I Don't Know Your Name

Today when I spied the Liquid Amber beginning to turn in color while the pink and white Vincas and Lipstick Hibiscus are still in full bloom, I realized that it is truly autumn in my corner of the world.

 

That first cranberry leaf still clinging to the lower branch reminded me of childhood, when I would collect the most perfect fallen autumn leaves, pressing them between sheets of waxed paper, hoping to preserve their glorious crimsons and golds and ambers and rusts for another day.

 

If there were no "perfect" leaves to be found on a crisp afternoon, I would gather and mound acorns fallen from Mr. Genzel's oak tree in places where I knew the squirrels could find them. I was so afraid they'd not have enough to eat during the long winter that was to ensue. They were my friends: The trees, the flowers, the brown squirrels with fluffy tails, the sparrows and the rare cardinal in the sugar maple branches, the Canadian geese flying overhead: yes, they were my friends and I knew them by name.

 

Those memories tugged at me while driving to work, taking me back to countless hours spent under the sprawling rainbow branches of trees, playing in their limbs, dreaming in their arms, calling them by name:
 
Black Oak, Red Mulberry
Sugar Maple and Northern Red Oak.
Sumac, White Poplar, Balsam Poplar
and Horse Chestnut.
White Walnut, Yellow Birch, Red Maple
and Wild Black Cherry.
Cottonwood, Hemlock, Red Cedar
Norway Spruce and Larch.
Scotch, Jack, Red and White Pines
and of course the never-forgotten
American Elm:

 

1969: I cried the day we had to cut down what life was left in our Elm.

 

And there I was, caught up in the memories of days past as I drove by a tree-lined street: lacy, frilly, celery green-leafed trees, filtering the early morning sun, causing shadows to dance and fall along the curbside:

 

And I was sad because I didn't know their names.