Leaves

     Bear with me.  Writing a daily blog, for me, goes something like this:  during every day, roughly a zillion possible subjects occur to me.  Sometimes I jot them down.  Later, I try to write about them, if I can remember why they seemed worth writing about.  Sometimes I can't find my list, or nothing on it strikes a chord, in which case I stare out the window and tell myself, "Just write about anything.  Pick something you see and write about it."
     So today I'm staring out the window and I decide to write about leaves.  There's just something about leaves that I really, really like.  For example, I love that the horse stalls get full of oak leaves when the wind blows on winter days, and when I go to clean out all the manure I can rake up leaves, manure and all, and the leaves help all the little bits of manure stick in the rake and the stalls come so nice and clean.  They make such a nice, crunchy sound, and they absorb some of the smell.  They also absorb the puddles in the stalls, and it almost seems as if some chemical in the leaves cleans and neutrallizes as it mixes with all the excrement and I shovel it away into the wheelbarrow.  Is it just my imagination?
     I love that leaves are green a lot of the time.  Green is my favorite color, and I deeply appreciate all the green leaves everywhere.  Maybe this comes from having lived all my life in this desert state.  Every year, I look forward with great excitement to that moment--and it is AN ACTUAL MOMENT--when all the little green leaf buds burst forth from all the oak trees surrounding my house.  One minute the trees stand, black, stark and bare against the sky, and then suddenly--you notice a sparkle of green in the pale, late-winter sunshine, shining at the very tip of a branch, and then another, and another, and look around--just like that, it's happened.
     One very, very precious memory to me is the story my son tells of the first time he came to visit me after I'd moved here to my oak-meadow ranch.  He'd driven all night from Portland with his two young sons, and in the very early morning as they pulled into my long, winding driveway, and his oldest began to stir and open his eyes, Joe said quietly, "Look, Hayden, we've come to the Shire."  It does have that magical air.  That morning, the trees were bare.  By that afternoon, to Joe's awe and amazement, they had budded.
     Though small, leaves can contain whole worlds.  There's the plant itself, so intricate close-up, with veins and skin and scales.  Underneath, insect eggs, tiny lives that will soon emerge to feed off of the plant, grow, change, and fly away to begin the cycle all over again on other leaves.  On top, a bright pink star, a gall that houses a small developing wasp.
     My goats eat the new small leaves budding low down on the oaks in their pasture like they're candy, doing a nice job of trimming up the trees for us.  I love to see a goat all stretched up on her hind legs, front legs propped on a tree, munching away.  Maybe I'm just easy to entertain.
     Walking my two little chihuahuas on a windy day is great entertainment.  They're convinced the leaves are chasing them and they get quite confrontational about it.  "Hey, cousin, be friendly!" barks Vinnie, while Tazzie declares, "I'll rip your face off, bwaaahhh."
     It's time to feed horses, so I'll have to "leave" off for now.