Baldomero had spent half the afternoon under a chestnut tree, hands on hips, waiting for a leaf to land where he had told it to. He had drawn a cross on a stone. There was a cream puff in his back pocket, his reward for getting the prediction right. The leaf came loose, twirled twice and sailed straight past.
“Over here, for fuck’s sake! I can see you!”
Nicanora was stretched out on the moss. We had come for a picnic, but this was becoming worth putting down our walnuts for.
“Baldomero, darling, it fell off a tree. It didn’t agree to meet you here.”
Gravity pulls. The air has other ideas.
Leaves fall because gravity pulls them down, but the air slows their descent and changes their movement. Their shape, weight, flexibility and changing angle all play a part. A broad, light leaf can rock from side to side or turn as it falls. Another drops faster. They don’t all move at the same pace, however much Baldomero looks like a man about to call the manager.
The air moves too. A gust can push leaves sideways, send them spinning or briefly lift them. That’s why some drift down slowly while others shoot away. There’s physics behind the dance, even if we prefer to see a party. The leaf doesn’t choose its route. Baldomero wasn’t choosing it either, but admitting that was giving him a right bloody struggle.
Our runaway brushed a fern, rose a little and drifted away from the stone. Baldomero followed. Whenever he thought he had caught it, the leaf turned and left him hugging thin air.
“Get back here and fall like a normal person!”
We were clutching our bellies by then. Nicanora suggested that expecting a leaf to behave like his brother-in-law might be the problem. His brother-in-law, incidentally, was much worse at falling over and needed carrying home afterwards.
A few turns don’t mean you’re going wrong.
Sometimes we look at life the way Baldomero was looking at that stone. We had picked a place, a date, a way things were supposed to happen. Then something shifts and we immediately decide we have messed the whole thing up. We give ourselves hell for taking a bend before we have even seen what lies around it.
His temper began to fade when he sat down beside us. He watched a yellow leaf turning slowly. As it crossed a gap in the canopy, the light caught its veins. For a second, it looked as though someone had stitched the sun inside it.
“All those turns, just to end up on the ground,” he muttered.
“Well, you came all this way to eat a cream puff. Let’s not get too grand.”
That set us giggling. Then we went quiet for a while, the comfortable sort of quiet where nobody has anything to prove. The air smelled of damp earth. Some leaves barely moved. Others looked as though they had just discovered their hips. We liked all of them. None of them owed us a perfect landing.
We hadn’t sorted our lives out. We still had leaking roofs, muddles and things that frightened us. But there was room for walnuts too, and friends, and this lovely sight that nobody had arranged for us. It does us a world of bloody good to remember we can enjoy something without keeping a grip on it.
Baldomero took a deep breath and announced that he was at peace with the universe. Then he felt something soft under his bum. He stood up slowly. Cream had squeezed through the seam of his pocket.
Nicanora looked at him. We looked at the stone. The leaf had finally landed right on the cross while he was sitting on his snack.
“Next bloody revelation, I’m standing up.”
