Autumn Stake

The yellow was there the whole time.

A green leaf is full of color you cannot see. The carotenoids that make it gold and orange are present all summer, doing their work quietly underneath, hidden by chlorophyll. In autumn the tree stops making chlorophyll, the green drains away, and what was already there comes through. Nothing is added. Something is simply subtracted.

The reds are the odd ones. Those the tree manufactures on purpose, late in the season, at real expense, and nobody has entirely settled why. Sunscreen for the leaf while it draws back the last of its nutrients is the leading guess. It remains a guess.

Then the tree cuts the leaf loose on purpose too — grows a thin layer of cells at the base of the stem, seals the wound, and lets go. The leaf does not fall so much as it is released.

We had this one cut as an oak leaf, a maple leaf, and a pair of acorns hung from a branch. The acorns are worth their own note: oaks across a whole county will agree, some years, to drop an enormous crop all at once, then follow it with several thin years. The working theory is that it feeds the squirrels and jays into a stupor in the fat years and starves them in the lean ones, so that some acorns survive to be oaks.

The pendants lift off the rings. Swap them out when the season turns and the branch stays where it is.

Set it where you look out — the tree past the kitchen window, the porch post, the gate.

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