I can’t stop looking out my window at the October sun splashing on October colored leaves. And this morning, a brick red maple forced me to pull my car over and capture an impression of its brilliance to share with Rae.
“It’s like Nature’s showing off,” she replied.
It’s below.
I do believe that the beauty of fall leaves is intensified knowing that these colors will not last long, that they are very temporary—like the cherry blossoms in Japanese poetry. Here this week, gone the next. And fall is Nature’s tacit signal that the trees have begun withdrawing their energy and life source into the ground to protect it from the cold. It’s part of the natural rhythm, and we celebrate leaves passing by pressing beautiful leaves into books, standing roadside with cameras clicking because we know leaves will return in spring.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow/ That I shall say goodbye ‘til it be morrow.”
On my way home from my daughter’s orchestra concert tonight, I had to slow my car because two people were standing at the top of Summit Street where I was passing through. They seemed enamored with what I thought was a plastic bag. It turned out to be a opossum. Hit by a car, it struggled to find its balance, crawl out of a pool of its own blood and off the road. It would not accept the fact that time was up.
And unlike the fall leaves I’m admiring through the window, this poor creature’s life source had been disrupted, ebbing away before the appropriate time. Timing is the difference between tragedy and whatever it is we call life’s natural rhythms.
There’s something that I’m curious about here that I’m not quite sure how to name. Life comes to us without us ever asking for it. We’re alive a long time before we ever think about holding on to our life, securing our life, making the most of our life. And when it’s snatched from us before we’re ready to give it up—or we see it snatched away from another living creature as I saw with the opossum in the road last night—we see the way that Life—capital “L” Life—cheats.
Life does not seem to know the rules.
Why? is the boring and unanswerable question. How Life cheats may be more interesting, but even that is not really what I’m wondering about. What I’m curious about has something to do with the brief encounter I had with the dying opossum. (S)he encountered a tragic moment during its nightly rounds. (S)he was doing exactly what opossums do but found itself in the path of a car that was also doing what it does.
The natural behaviors of a car and a opossum resulted in the death of one.
High Violet, The National (2010)
Life on earth is a tangle of intersecting lives with imbalanced outcomes. We have feelings about these outcomes. It seems that some are fair, others unfair. How many intersecting lives create joy! And yet, some inspire sadness, perceived losses. So, it’s not the fairness of these intersections that I wonder about as much as perhaps the impact of seeing life as a series of intersecting lives that interests me. How terrible that a car and a opossum intersected last night at approximately 9.47pm on the very same spot of asphalt. Each were going about their business as cars and opossums are want to do and tried to occupy the same patch of ground at the same time. Yes, some intersections in life result in pain and sadness.
Thinking about the tragedy of the opossum does allow me to think about other intersections I’ve experienced and the laughter and heartbreak that they have brought.
I’m not really sure what to do with this perspective beyond acknowledging how very precious our encounters—our intersections, where are my manners?!—with others are and that we must value and cherish and hold them all with wonderous, open hearts.
