Penser de l’automme

Rain was in the forecast, yet habit held me to ponder the start of a new day sipping strong coffee in a familiar, warm-season spot—an aluminum deck chair with sullied white canvas stitched and holding to its frame. The chair rests beyond the back door of my studio and albeit time-worn, it remains inviting for a quiet sit.

I bent to the ground and picked up a spent leaf and began to study it, running my fingers over its finite architecture, its leatherlike sheen tinged with tones of the earth. It’s as if each fine vein, most prominent on its underside, led to reminders of past season’s change. My fingertips seemed to follow a tactile map to my earlier years, beginning with uncomfortable shadow memories of early schooling and science classes or whatever when we were taught to dissect frogs to be able to describe their innards. How I related a dead leaf to naïve cruelty I have no idea. I have the hunch it has something to do with me not wanting to be in the stale air of a school room at this time of year after running free in the outdoors in months previous. I bet that’s it, those losslike memories, but whatever it is, I must admit that the lessons that supposedly came out of those experiences are something I have as yet to put into practicable use except to know when I hear the frogs of spring singing in the night is that they have livers located somewhere down on their left side of their underbellies. Or is it their right side? Whatever side it’s on, decades later I continue to release those coldblooded memories with sweetgrass prayers asking forgiveness of the amphibious world.

Coming back to the topic of tree leaves and science, I think early classes were about chlorophyll and the alchemy of water and temperature and soil nutrition, but my close-up look this morning suggests that a leaf’s structure more or less resembles that of a kite. You know, the way a kite has stays that support a light fabric skin. The skeletal formation of the leaf seems to lead from a spine that originates at a tree’s finest branches. From the centre of the leaf, tender blood vessel-like lines feed the outer extremities. The leaf pattern resembles that of a drawing of a tree itself.

The leaf in my hand is from a tree that grows directly overhead. Its species is that of black maple and is one that I transported along with several others from eastern Ontario. The trees were my first addition to the County property I purchased twenty years ago, and they originated from a sugar bush that was part of the Saunders family ancestral farm near Lynch, Ontario. The bush of hardwood trees was a remnant of a once mixed forest that existed prior to colonial arrival and clearing of land. Corn had become the main crop on the working farm until one winter when the owners decided that come spring, the bush would be encouraged to expand, reclaiming the acreage that corn was then occupying. It was determined that as the forest returned, maple products like syrup derived from the trees would offset any reduction of income that came from seasonal corn crops.

Maple saplings were identified in the bush of autumn prior to when leaves began to fall. Come April, the saplings were transplanted and set into two rows that ran almost a half mile along the front lands. The process was repeated the following spring with rows planted behind the original set of trees. Every year for over thirty years the family and their generations kept up the pattern, and at the time I first saw the maple bush as I approached by car, I was gobsmacked witnessing a five-acre forest whose leafy roof descended in a slope similar to that of a giant woodshed. The oldest and tallest of the trees rose to over forty feet high and descended in growth size to the most recently planted row of saplings which were about eight feet in height. This is but one of the fondest recalls that the leaf in my hand has brought me to this morning.

But there’s something else. The descendants of the trees now growing on my small spot of Hillier clay were the trees that supplied our family with maple syrup as we made our spring pilgrimage to the Saunders Family maple operation to enjoy a pancake breakfast and to stock up on large quantities of syrup that would last us all year. The leaf knurled and dried now sits before me on my writing desk. It has called me to memories of today’s family of black maple trees that surround me throughout my seasons living along the winding Slab Creek.