Leafing Others' Expectations Behind

It’s tough to be a leaf in the fall.

Imagine, a whole season named for your demise.

Poor bastards

It’s lot of pressure. Starting the day after Labor Day, or Memorial Day, whichever the second one is, every person within eye shot is watching you, waiting to see if you will turn as bright and colorful as the Tourism Bureau promises. 

The leaf must want to scream at these people. It’s still summer, for God’s sake! It’s going to be summer for another three weeks! Put away the sweater and check on your kid – he’s slaughtering a colony of ants with a magnifying glass!

A poor leaf up on Skyline Drive must really feel it. Five hundred thousand over-optimistic parents from Boston to Atlanta are going to pre-book autumn foliage viewing trips for their families, reserving every room in every Shitt’s Creek in the Appalachians, dragging their kids for a rushed weekend blitzkrieg of Hillbilly Elegy country, only to arrive and find out that peak color is still three weeks away, or was three weeks ago. 

And then the poor parent, who only wanted to create a lifetime memory for her kids (who wouldn’t remember anyway because they wouldn’t look up from their phones if the car went off the side of one of those winding roads) is reduced to narrating the trip with commentary like “oooh, I’ll bet that tree will be pretty next month” and fending off passive aggressive shots from her grumpy husband who is missing the Virginia Tech and Panthers’ games (relax, Ken, they’re both going to lose… again).

(Side note: I wanted to find the male version of “Karen,” so I went to Google and started typing. By the time I got to “male eq”, the search engine had already suggested “male equivalent of karen.” So not such an original joke I guess.)

It ought to be illegal to take a reservation outside the two weeks on either side of peak color. It’s like selling eclipse-watching cruise packages that occur a month before the eclipse actually happens. But these motel owners don’t care. They’re barely hanging on. AirBNB has transformed their business model from “clean bed for business travelers and weekend respite for families” to “meth-friendly room rates and no cops unless there’s a body.”

And it all lands on the leaf. Nobody paid a minute’s worth of attention to this poor guy for the last six months unless he was rolling over in the face of a thunderstorm, and now he has to live up to, not only the impossible standard of a filter-adjusted pic on a town website, but do so at exactly the right time. It’s a lot. 

The leaf might take solace in Ralph Waldo Emerson (“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”) if it read Emerson, but who’s got time.

And, then, once they’ve fulfilled others’ expectations (or not… probably not), they are left alone again. 

Except there is still expectation. The expectation is that they will hang on as long as they possibly can, keep their grip on that mortal branch until they can’t… can’t… can’t… stay a second longer, and then let go, all so the Foliage Times obit can brag that they fought til the end.

And so leaves, long past meaningful existence, brown and withered, barely hang on, while the world averts its gaze from a condition so uncomfortable.

But there is an alternative. Occasionally you’ll see a leaf that chooses its moment – a sunny, crisp day… and lets go, according to its own prerogative, still colorful, still full, still able to catch the breeze and spin away, riding the zephyr like dandelion pappus, traveling farther in its departure from this existence than it ever did during it.

And as the leaf leaves, it defies… no, even better… ignores… the expectations of others. 

If you enjoy this essay, please do me the favor of share it or passing it along to a like-minded friend. Thank you.

- Chuck