Leaves I

Part I - Two Leaves

Once upon a time, there was a tree. The tree was green with leaves, and had many sturdy branches to support the heavy weight of all the leaves. The tree was not special, there were other trees around it too. However, our story does not concern them. It, in fact, does not concern that one particular tree to that great an extent either. Our story begins, instead, when the tree shed its leaves in fall, preparing for the coming cold and harsh winter.


Among the hundreds of leaves that fell over the languid weeks of the fall season, there were two leaves that I want to tell you about. These leaves were not very different from their brethren drifting down slowly around them. The first leaf was called Uck, and the leaf that soon became its fellow traveller was called Ton. Uck and Ton were from different parts of the tree, so they had not known each other before they were evicted from their home perches by the self-preserving action of the tree. Yet all leaves have the same language, irrespective of the species of tree, and so they were able to talk to each other when they finally met.

Uck fell first. Having been at the outermost edge of the tree's branches, it drifted by Ton, carried by the wind within view of the other leaf. Uck settled in a clean dry patch on the ground. While other leaves were starting their rituals of death, preparing for death and decomposition, Uck was sulking because it had been thrown down.

Ton came by a few hours later. Uck pretended not to notice, and tried to carry on scowling.

"Stop that sulk. If you carry on for some time, that look will stick to your leaf-face", Ton admonished Uck. "I'm Ton, by the way, from near the trunk where the squrriel has taken over the old hollow."

"Uck, from near where the sun hits first every summer morning", Uck had to be polite to a leaf that was polite. That's the way leaves behave, much better than us fallible humans.

"Well, so now we're out. Life as we know it has finished. What do you plan to do?" Ton prodded Uck.

Annoyed by the intrusion into its privacy and the disruption of a good honest sulk, Uck replied a bit heatedly,

"What do I plan to do? Why, who knows? I have been thrust into this situation, I didn't choose it. I hadn't kept dying in mind when I made plans for life. What can I do, but remember how proud the days were when I was the first leaf that the sun's rays crept out to every morning. Oh, what woe!", moaned Uck. Leaves are good at moaning. They learn it from the wind when it howls in a strong gale or a thunderstorm.

"What's done is done. I suppose you're one of those stupid vain leaves that believe that they will live forever, and that they are special because they happened to have a spot that others envied. But now you're down on the ground, just like old inner-tree plebes like me. So stop moaning, and think about what you want to do now. You must carry on. Leaves crumple and die just because they lose their self-pride. There is much more waiting out there. Let us go out and see."

The leaf named Ton said all this with a smile of patience on its broad dark green face.

"What do you plan to do?" Uck asked after a little while. Uck had been watching Ton's face, and was surprised by a strange feeling of confidence and the passage of gloom rising up in it. It was indeed strange, but this leaf Ton sounded like it knew what it was talking about.

So Uck too, waited right along side Ton.


End of Part I