The Flight of the Maple Leaf
The Bigleaf maple in my neighbor’s yard is ablaze. From where I lie in bed each morning, looking south through double doors, the maple glows in early sun. On gray mornings and in the fading light of late afternoon, the leaves seem to be illuminated from within.
The dance of falling maple leaves has long enchanted me. The ballast of their knob-ended petiole, around which they whirl and twirl on their way to nourishing the soil with their decomposition. The breezes that blow through after rain, such as they did this morning, launch the leaves on lateral trajectories, wind and gravity and the structural properties of the leaf in a beautiful collaboration we call fall.
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Maple Phenology
Phenology: the timed response of plants and animals to the cues of natural conditions, such as day length, temperature, precipitation, and other atmospheric conditions. From the Greek phaino, “to show, to bring to light, to make to appear,” and logos, “study, discourse, reasoning.”
Cued by the diminishing light, the leaves of a Bigleaf maple begin preparing for flight in early autumn. As daylight decreases, the veins transporting water and nutrients to a maple’s leaves close off, ending the process by which its chlorophyll is synthesized. Chlorophyll, the most abundant pigment in leaves, absorbs red and blue wavelengths from the sun and reflects green tones. Within a leaf, chlorophyll attaches to chloroplasts, aiding in the process of photosynthesis.
As chlorophyll breaks down, other pigments, present to lesser degrees all along, can be expressed. Carotene – the same pigment that colors pumpkins and carrots and sweet potatoes – turns a maple’s leaves yellow. The intensity of that yellow is acted upon by temperature and rainfall. Warm daytime and cold nighttime temperatures combined with a good balance of rain and sun create the most vibrant hues.
When the breakdown of chlorophyll gets underway, maples prepare to offload their yellowing leaves – no longer capable of food production – to conserve their precious sugars in preparation for winter. A maple leaf’s petiole, or stem, is attached to the tree at a junction called the abscission zone. Abscission (a word related to scissors) is the process by which hormones cause the line of cells in that junction to burst, severing the petiole’s attachment to the tree. The leaf now needs only a bit of encouragement – by breeze, by rain – to launch on its journey.
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The Holiness of the Liminal
I love to imagine a maple leaf in flight as nature’s scribe, each of its points a stylus scribbling secret incantations in invisible ink on the slate of sky through which it falls.
I love to catch a maple leaf in its fall, to hold something that hasn’t touched the ground since it was the stuff of soil, slowly gathered up by fungal hyphae and delivered to root tips, then drawn up through the tree’s xylem to again become its leaves. There’s something of the holy in it.
As on the Indonesian island of Bali, where the belief that a baby’s connection to the spirit realm from which it emerged remains intact for a time after birth. This connection is holy and protected by a custom of keeping a newborn from touching the ground for her first 105 days of life. Then, in ceremony, she is set on the ground for the first time, her soul having finally adhered to her body – no longer a flight risk.
The magic in a maple leaf, falling and caught in midair, has something to do with the baby in Bali – a soul that has yet to succumb to gravity, suspended for a time in a liminal place. What’s in that liminality? I have no idea, but I sense it so deeply that, when I catch a maple leaf in flight, I bless myself with it. I hope to absorb some of that holiness in doing so. I brush myself with the leaf, that already smells of the earth to which it’s falling, from my crown down my face. Then my dog, if she’s with me, gets the same treatment. I pray that some of the tree’s holiness will sink into us both. That something of its belonging to place will be transmitted.
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“A Bride, Married to Amazement”
The age-old criticism of science is its displacement of mystery, its explaining away of a sense that might otherwise lead one to deem something holy. But the understanding science has gifted me – the phenology of maple trees in this instance – has only deepened my sense of wonder. The flight of the maple leaf is more miraculous to me for having names for and descriptions of the structures and processes at play.
To begin to understand the symphony of factors and their orchestration, that these processes are not intrinsic to the tree but to the whole place – including the atmosphere, including the earth’s position relative to the sun, and that position’s effect on our days… My head swims through the cosmic soup of it all, in Mary Oliver’s words, “a bride married to amazement,” the maple blessing our union by showering us – my amazement and me, and my dog, Maple, if she’s with me – with golden leaves.
