Mary Oliver #4- "Fall"

 How apt it is for Mary Oliver to have written one of my favorite poems in October- a special month of the year for me. As a child, October's were filled with freezing Friday night football games and too hot cups of hot chocolate, flipping through magazines to pick the perfect Halloween costume, celebrating my sister and I's birthdays with decorations and laughs, soccer games with dew still afoot, and plenty of leaf piles. Autumn, or fall, whichever you prefer, sings of nostalgia for me. It's a place that feels safe and comfortable, and I cherish it each year because it feels like coming home and becoming young again. I recognize this juxtaposes itself with the notion that things actually age and die in the fall, but it has never mattered much to me. In my opinion, fall is growth in its own way- shedding the things of old and donning the new barren branches, that will one day sprout new buds again. I think Mary Oliver would agree in that it is growth in its own way- as she describes the leaves not as dead things, but rather "bronze fruit" being flung about. It makes me smile to think of the oaks as active participants in the transition into fall, methodically placing the fruits in every pocket of the earth. At times, it feels like that, particularly in the areas where I hail from. I truly believe that Vermont, where my parents were raised, and Arkansas, where I grew up, boast two of the most inconspicuously beautiful autumns. My favorite lines of the poem are "what is spring all that tender green stuff compared to this falling of tiny oak trees out of the oak trees then the clouds".  All semester we have been talking about noticing beauty in the mundane things, and I think that the falling of leaves is one of the places I see this most tangibly. There is beauty in the breaking off from the tree, and as the lead falls, it nestles itself in the moving world. But for that moment, as it floats down, there is beauty and freedom in the simplicity, the intricacy, of a single leaf. Mary Oliver knows it, and so do I.