Los Gatos Weekly-Times

The melancholy days are come

By Carl Heintze

These autumn days my first task every morning is to rake leaves. The leaves are from a large liquidambar tree we planted in a corner of our front lawn years ago. The tree is now at least 50 feet high. Its roots have threaded their way through the lawn like lace. They are pushing up the cement of the sidewalk, and they're cracking the driveway.

Through most of the year the tree is a green bower, shading the lawn, providing a place where a pair of doves makes an unfortunate nest--they often lose their young or their eggs--and making it easy to pick out our house. It has to be the biggest and oldest tree on the block.

But it's in the autumn that the tree comes into its full glory. Then, depending on when cold weather arrives, the leaves turn to yellow, red and gold and shower down on the lawn, carpeting it and reminding me of New England. True, I've only been in New England a couple of times in my life, and only once when the maples were in their full majesty, but it's what I think New England must look like at the height of its fall majesty.

Our liquidambar, of course, isn't a maple or a beech, and its leaves can't compare, but it does give a glimmer of what it would be like to be in Connecticut, Massachusetts or Maine during this season of the year.

There, the hardwoods are at their best for a few short weeks, you know the season is about to change and you can appreciate the beauty of the leaves.

Raking the leaves also reminds me of a long-forgotten comic strip called "Gasoline Alley," which always featured one of its characters, Uncle Walt, raking leaves in the autumn.

When I read it as a child, I always wondered what it meant, since the only autumn leaves I knew in California were the dun-colored leaves of the prune trees that carpeted the orchards of the valley in the fall. They were hardly a match for those in "Gasoline Alley."

When I was a child, as now, there were really only two seasons in California, wet and dry, and they were recognized as different only because they were wet and dry. Winter was wet, and the rest of the year was dry.

Since then, of course, I've gotten older, although I don't suppose I've gotten any wiser. But I have learned that we here in the Santa Clara Valley are the exception, not the rule, and that most of the rest of the nation has not two but four seasons.

I think that's fine. Not that I want to experience the autumns of New England, but I am grateful to the liquidambar for giving me a hint of autumn without really bringing it in full force.

The sight persuades me that despite the poet who wrote of this season, "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year," autumn need not mean decline and death and the coming cold of winter.

Still, when the liquidambar's leaves start to fall and I have to get out the rake, I tend also to the philosophical. I realize a year is about to pass, but that after winter, there will again be spring.

I think about that as I rake the leaves. I also think about it when I try to find some useful place for all those which have fallen.

Some of them I'll turn into mulch, but I know there will still be too many and that eventually I will have to rake them into the gutter so the garbage man can come and carry them away. Those that don't make it to the gutter will be carried away by the wind.

Nonetheless I rake away each day, thinking still of the leaves as a seasonal gift from the tree.

Now and then I look up in appreciation--and to see how many more have yet to come down.

For there is something I know that the tree doesn't. I know that it has gotten too large and that we can't continue to have it push up the driveway and the sidewalk; we no longer want it to thread its roots through the lawn.

I know that this winter, before spring comes, when its leaves are all gone, the sap in the tree has descended to the roots and the branches are barren, we are going to have it cut down and hauled away.

I know that, but I don't tell the tree. I just keep on raking up its glorious red, yellow and brown leaves.

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