Just as soon as our children could sit up without immediately toppling over and vanishing, I set them in heaped-high piles of Philadelphia’s autumn leaves, posing them for photographs to send home to the sepia world of their Texas grandparents. Once they could walk with confidence—left foot right foot, left foot right foot—I stored the double stroller, and together we made our daily way through the swirling leaves to their favorite playground. It was a long trek for tiny legs—all the way up steep McCallum Drive—so, one day, to keep them entertained on the way, I made up a game: whoever can catch a falling leaf before it hits the ground will be granted super good luck for the rest of the year. And just like that, nothing mattered to them except the catching of that luck-bringing leaf, not even the jungle gym and the tire swing calling to them from Allens Lane Park.
This autumn, my wife and I became empty nesters, so maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking so much lately about things like The Leaf Game, which was the name my children gave to this activity that I’d meant to be no more than one afternoon’s pleasant diversion. Each time we stepped outside, their faces turned eagerly skyward, up toward the towering trees. Each was determined to be the first to catch that magic leaf. Doing so sounds easy enough, but even the slightest puff of wind can make unpredictable work of a leaf’s groundward sojourn, even for a coordinated adult to calculate (as I quickly found out), but it was especially difficult for lurching, graceless toddlers. If I concentrate, I can still hear their tiny, giggling shrieks as they scuttled beneath the shedding trees lining our neighborhood’s sidewalks, their chubby hands raised high, fingers ready to snatch.
Growing up in hot, dry Texas, I envied the Northeast its autumns. On television, where that exotic world lived, September and October meant wool sweaters, scarecrows, and bonfires, but most importantly it meant leaves the color of cranberries, pumpkins, and crookneck squash. They tumbled slowly through the air to gather in mounds waiting to be leapt into. Meanwhile, the autumn leaves of North Texas were, if not merely the same as summer’s boring green, nothing but brown—the color of paper-bags and cicada-shells—and the air was only slightly less sweaty and hot than July’s. I found this grossly unfair, and I resented it intensely.
In our thirties, my wife and I moved to Pennsylvania, which the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources told me has the longest and most varied fall foliage season in the world. I couldn’t wait for my first autumn. When it came, I reveled in its crisp brightness, its smoky scent, and its crunch underfoot. What I’d seen all those years on television was true, and it thrilled me, which is why I always did my best to appreciate each day’s singular beauty, knowing as I did the barren deadness of December rushing toward us. Meanwhile, everyone around me who had grown up amid this annual explosion just seemed to carry on—ho-hum—with their days. How could they be so indifferent to the ginkgo’s yellow, the dogwood’s red, the sugar maple’s orange? How could they have grown so accustomed to such magnificent displays?
One October afternoon, as my son was tracking yet another evasive leaf somewhere between the park and home, he stepped off the curb and into Hortter Avenue, oblivious to everything except his golden objective. Hurrying after what kept drifting just out of his reach, he made it all the way to the far lane before I was able to reach him and snatch him quickly up. No cars were near, for which I was hysterically grateful, but he’d scared me terribly. Realizing that neither of them could truly grasp the danger that cars posed to their tiny bodies no matter how dangerous I said they were, I shut the game down immediately, and for good. I told them that it was now too late in the year: catching a leaf would no longer bring any good luck. Because Daddy still knew everything then, my daughter accepted this revision just as quickly and fully as she’d once believed the original, but not my son; having been presented a challenge, he continued his determined pursuit. And I had to keep pulling him back, even when we were surrounded by the safety of the park. I hated doing this, but I knew he’d dart without care into the street again if necessary, and what if he did this when I wasn’t there to hold him by the collar? On sleepless nights, nightmarish movies played in my head.
I’ve now lived in Pennsylvania for twenty years, which means that I’ve been lucky enough to witness twenty autumns, all of them lit by an astonishing glow particular to the season here between the Schuylkill River and the Delaware. My son eventually forgot about the leaf game, but not before giving me several more frights. Soccer balls replaced leaves as his favorite thing to chase after. Nowadays, with no little ones to escort, I rarely walk to the park, even in October, but when I do, I still marvel at the leaves as they release themselves to swirl about. It’s a sight that takes me back to the days of my fresh fatherhood. Sometimes I’m tempted to reach out and snatch one of these gamboling leaves from the air, but missing the tiny people my children once were and loving the grown people they are now, I keep my hands in my pockets, doing my superstitious best to continue keeping them safe from bad luck and dangers unforeseen. When I talk to them on the phone at their respective colleges, I don’t tell them any of this, of course, but I do ask them about the fall leaves there. They’re pretty, they tell me, but not as pretty as at home.
