by Susan Chernak McElroy

Created on: December 12, 2008

Leaves anoint me. They twirl down, they float, they dip, they fall like golden snowflakes. Around my feet, they pile up bronze, lemon, scarlet, and mahogany. They come out of skies blue as a baby's eye. Sitting outside on my deck, I am kissed by leaves and blanketed with them. Never have I had such a colorful fall as this first one in Indiana. Never have I been so befriended by leaves.

In my old home in the Rockies, I knew the personality of the aspens and cottonwoods and their dainty coin-shaped leaves that turned golden and fell to earth all in about two weeks' time. There was a spare and thrifty feel to those leaves, and I was reminded by them to keep myself simple and to not waste my energy on frills. The trees and creatures and landscape of the mountain lands had many, many stories and wisdoms to share with me, and in listening to them, I became more like that land in body, heart, and spirit.

These leaves and this place are different. It is luxurious and generous here. The landscape is not about sparseness and frugality and exposed, naked views. It is about depth and color and excess and secret, hidden glens. Here, the leaves can somehow afford to be enormous, fancy, garishly colorful, and hedonistic. The folds in the hills are cloaked in the lavish, dense fabric of leaf mats and berry bushes. The deer are fat. The squirrels are fat. There are too many acorns, walnuts, hickory and beechnuts to horde, and so the nuts litter the forest floor like pathways of rich brown opals.

In my new home of only two-and-a-half months, I am startled to rediscover something I know but often forget I know: that landscapes mold us, guide us, make love to us, and through their mysterious issue of light and life, become part of us. In city or country, desert and town, we are tutored and courted by place. Sometimes it is a sooty, lackluster sort of courtship, but even so, we are affected-and deeply so-by this kind of marriage offer we cannot refuse to accept.

I have lived in places that have deadened me, that have intoxicated me, that have tested, tortured, and titillated me. And because I have learned what land can do to and for you, I am becoming more careful where I put myself, not just in where I live, but in where I spend the hours of my day. Parking lots suck the marrow out of my bones. Malls eat my soul and make my feet sore. City parks spark me. Driving through old and well-tended neighborhoods feeds my eyes and my heart. I remember that there is an overall landscape we

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