Counting Leaves

Another great essay from Bill Felker’s lovely essays about his seasonal observations in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taken from Poor Will’s Almanack. This is from November, 2005:

Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;

New things succeed as former things grow old.

Robert Herrick

On the night of November 11^th-12^th a year ago, the temperature in my yard dropped to the middles 20s. At 8:30 in the morning, I looked out the back door as the sun was coming up over the houses on High Street: I saw the green leaves of the white mulberry tree starting to fall.

I was excited because I had never witnessed the total collapse of the mulberry. My notebooks have kept sporadic track of that particular tree’s history. It lost its foliage on the 3^rd in 1991, on the 4^th inn 1988, on the 6^th in 1982, on the 8^th in 1990, on the 11^th in 1984 and 1986, on the 12^th in 1983 and 1992, on the 17^th in 1989, on the 23^rd in 1994. But I had never actually seen the leaves come down all at once.

So now I watched in awe; the branches hemorrhaged, leaves clattering down in sheets for almost an hour. At 9:30 the tree was empty, and the ground was covered.

Trying to understand what I’d witnessed, I went out and counted the number of leaves in a square foot beneath the tree: 65 leaves large and small filled the space. I measured the area that held most of the newly fallen leaves: 55 by 40 square feet. I multiplied, came up with 2,200 square feet, multiplied that times 65 leaves per square foot. I had seen something in the neighborhood of 143,000 leaves come down, gave or take maybe 50,000. Divided by 50 minutes, that would be about 3,000 leaves a minute.

Driving through the country later in the afternoon, I saw the remnants of other white mulberries. It seems they had all come apart at the same time. And the next morning when I arrived at work, I found that the ginkgo near my window had shed all its leaves overnight. I went outside and counted again. There were about 100 ginkgo leaves in a square foot, all lying in an area about 35 feet by 35 feet: my math produced 122,000 leaves.

Now concerning to the value of such imprecise and frivolous calculations, I’m not sure what to say. The numbers are one way of trying to gauge the enormity of the end of summer. Counting, like keeping records, is an attempt to touch the elusive movements of time. Tallying the leaves, I pretend to experience and salvage more of their passage.

Bill Felker who writes and records the signs of the season in Yellow Springs, Ohio. You can order his 2011 Poor Will’s Almanack  here.

Writing a Novel in a Month

I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month five times but this is the first time I made it across the finish line. I wrote 51,274 words in 30 days. I’ve been working for ten years on a mystery novel set in Victorian London featuring a medium. It’s hard to figure out how to write a novel from the point of view of someone who’s in trance when everything interesting happens. It’s also hard to write a mystery novel when the murder victim can talk directly to the protagonist.

I decided to experiment in November with writing it from different points of view. It’s been really interesting; I learned a lot about myself as a novelist. (Mostly that I can’t write a really coherent novel this fast.)

But I have a rough draft of a complete novel and I might be able to fix it through revision. Not that I’m going to start on that anytime soon. I’m waiting until April when I expect to teach a revision class.