Hallelujah of Leaves

by Vernie Lynn DeMille

 

I love leaves.  

 

I love them when they’re unfurling from bark hard buds into flower-like shoots in early spring. 

 

I love them when they grow big as dinner plates and the children wear them like hats as they play beneath the trees that gifted them such glorious playthings. 

 

I love leaves when they show their shiny underbellies with every stray breeze that lifts them to find the wildlife that lives beneath. 

 

I love them when they’re densely green on a hot summer afternoon and I can find cool shade beneath them.  

 

I love them when the wind moves them on warm August mornings and they play peek-a-boo with the peaches that lay ripe and ready for picking behind them. 

 

I love them when early autumn dusts their leaves like flour and the sun bakes the fruit until the fragrance of the air declares the fruit is done with growing. 

 

I love the early September leaves,  dry at the tip, just beginning to brown and curl as the apples and pears bend the branches down and make it easier for small hands to grasp the treasure the leaves have been holding.  

 

I love small leaves that gather in large groups that burst free from their branches in early autumn to fall like confetti on the country lane and regroup like bunting around the fence rows lining the fields.  

 

I especially love the leaves of mountain maples, their tree roots clinging to crags in the Rocky Mountains, their foliage burning brilliant, beautiful, outrageously red; like God on His holy mountain speaking face to face with His prophet of old.

 

They overwhelm me with joy. They fill my soul with it until the feeling brims over and runs from my eyes, watering my cheeks,  and I cannot stop the wonder of grace and beauty, incapable of being dammed. 

 

“Hallelujah” escapes me in a whisper, overcome as I am by this wilderness cathedral, and praises fill me even though I know in mere days this fire will blow away on the October winds.  

 

Brevity doesn’t seem to matter in the life of a leaf -or myself- when there’s glory such as this at the end of our days; or when I can testify, while we yet live, that here and now I walked with God on the hallowed ground they cover.   

 

September 27, 2023