for the love of leaves

Literati

Our contest continues with a second entry by our favorite nature girl in the Great Northwest, Laura Girardeau.  Our contest deadline will fall like autumn leaves, so be sure to enter soon, and please leave comments to help rebuild our commnioty of writers and kindred spirits.

Talking Leaves

Words so luscious, you want to lick the pages. Sweet scent of aged paper like a dandy’s pipe or a flapper’s perfume. Who read this before me? What were their dreams, and who were their first loves?

Spines line up in the library. Like trees in a forest, they wait patiently for you to choose one to appreciate. Older ones like Sappho, Plato, Darwin, and Lawrence have hard backs, straight and proud. Younger ones like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are more flexible, can be hucked in a pack on a huckleberry trip. A blade of grass can often be found in Leaves of Grass.

If a teacher assigned it, it stayed in my locker. If not, it was under my covers with a flashlight. I slept with the best of them, got into their minds and dreams, plumbed their depths. I could see the authors writing certain lines. A profound one took countless scratch-outs, a hunched back, maybe a kerosene lamp. A witty line of dialogue made them laugh, and maybe their spouse didn’t get the joke. Or maybe they didn’t marry, took the road less traveled in a room of their own. (Frost took the road less traveled but married anyway).

I read assigned books as an afterthought, BS’ed enough to pull A’s. But there’s a particular pleasure in pulling out at book at an odd hour, by an odd author, well beyond your grade level: The Hobbit during subtraction lessons, 1984 in 2026. I knew some books so well, it was almost in the biblical sense (except for The Bible).

You could say I loved them. We reread certain lines, as we do a human love, tasting them over and over. We want to woo them with our own lines, rehearse what we’d say. We try to memorize a human love, but never do. That bit of mystery keeps us revisiting them, exploring.

I don’t read as many books now that I work on screens all day, weeding words as an editor. At the end of the day my eyes are tired, and I’d rather escape into the woods. People say I should listen to audiobooks on walks. But like a lover, I want to hold a book in my hands, feel its weight, its impact on history. Will an audiobook feel the same as that first kiss of the pages? The scent of the ages bewitches me. The keen nick of a paper cut draws my blood and my devotion.