Being | Janus

Being

By Stefanie Eggleston

I see the breeze in the way the leaves dance across the sidewalk. It picks up. It dies down. Leaves skitter from side to side, grazing the concrete. A lot of the trees are bare now, but some are still full, and I wonder what the difference between them is. My dad once taught me how to tell trees apart by their leaves, just like his dad had taught him when he was younger. I wonder if maybe some are oaks and some are maples and that’s why they have lost their leaves at a different rate. The ones full of green leaves are oaks, I know for sure. I mostly know this by the acorns littering the sidewalk beneath them, bouncing off the concrete as they fall. I have been hit in the head by a falling acorn more than once while walking down this sidewalk. Between the brown branches and green oak leaves, a tree completely yellow peaks out, and I wonder if it’s yet another kind of tree. Honestly, other than oak or maple, I can’t think of what else it could be. A dogwood maybe, but I don’t know what those look like. There aren’t any around my house, so my dad never taught me about them.

I take a few pictures of the sky and the way the bare branches break it up into hundreds of little pale blue pieces. My camera can’t balance the light from the sun, so the branches look solid black against a nearly white sky. It’s kind of like a puzzle. I think of a puzzle my family put together once, an outside scene filled with bare trees. We finished most of it until all we had left were pieces that looked just like the pictures I am taking, just a bunch of dark lines through a light background. I gave up at that point, leaving the scattered pieces for my dad to sort out to make a picture. Now, though, I snap another photo.

I stand up to look at the leaves on the trees, because I’m starting to think both the bare trees and the green ones are oaks. They are, and I can’t figure out why they’ve lost their leaves at such a different rate. They’re both red oaks even. My dad taught me that the leaves of red oaks are more pointed while those of white oaks are rounded with the phrase “the red man hunts with an arrow, the white man with a bullet.” That’s all I know about trees, though. I wish I knew why they looked so different at this time of year. `Maybe I’m thinking about this too much.

The yellow tree behind all the others is a maple. At least that difference in appearance makes sense. It reminds me of my favorite tree in our backyard as a child. All of its branches were placed in just the right spot for my small arms and legs to reach up just far enough to the next one and eventually make it to the top. My brother and I would climb as far as we could, then whoever was on the ground would tie snacks to a rope so the other person could pull them up. We wanted a treehouse so badly, but we had to resort to sitting on branches playing pretend. One day my parents paid my cousin to cut all the low branches off the trees in our yard, and I came home to see he had cut off the lowest branch of my favorite tree – the branch that made it so my tiny arms could pull myself up off the ground. I bawled as my dad tried to comfort me saying “it will grow back.” It didn’t grow back though. I know now that trees don’t work like that.

The grass is dying, covered in oak leaves, and probably won’t need mowed again until spring. It’s still green, but it’s no longer the vibrant green it turns after a fresh rain at the beginning of summer. I wish this was the perfect view of nature, but asphalt, concrete, and cars have intruded in on the scene, breaking up the greens and yellows and browns. Vehicles drive by, not in sync with the wind like the leaves scurrying across the sidewalk. People walk by opening and closing doors, not caring about the rhythm in their steps or where their footprints fall. I know that most days, I’m one of those people too – too concerned with getting to class on time to watch the leaves as they fall or listen to the wind whistle through tree branches. Whenever I sit down and really pay attention, I tell myself I’m going to stop being so busy, so absent from these beautiful simplicities of life. I take an ink pen to the inside of my arm and write “Be.” in a curly script, reminding myself to take a moment and just breathe sometimes, just exist in the moment I am in and not worry about what comes next.

The reminder washes off with my next shower, and by the next week I’ve completely forgotten about paying attention to how the wind rustles the leaves and what stage of dying the grass is in. I think about tattooing the word on my wrist, but it would eventually blend in with every freckle and scar on my body, something I never think about or notice. I stick to telling myself I will make a point to sit outside and write more often. To take in the world around me without judgement. To watch the seasons change around me.