Toilet Talk
A biologist friend of mine says that when we ooh and ahh at the rapturous explosion of fall foliage, what we’re really doing is clamoring about watching trees pee and poop. My granddaughter would say, “That’s bathroom talk.” And she wouldn’t be wrong, but neither would he.
Once a year—every year-- before dropping, leaves collect the garbage. All the stuff that a tree can’t use gets channeled to its appendages into a sort of trash can to be dumped when the time and temperature are right. It’s a shedding process called abscission. Leaves hoard the crap, a layer of cells seals it off at the base, and when the leaf falls, it takes the excrement with it. Detox with a vibrant, kaleidoscope glow.
It's the natural order of things—healthy, glorious, graphic, necessary. A ridding to make room for regeneration.
But leaves do more than just go out in a blaze of glory. They spend their green years in purposeful service. Living in a state of perpetual change, they balance a workload of food production, oxygen release, water management, wind resistance—jobs that are essential to the health and life of a tree. They also communicate with one another and with their neighbors, sharing nutritional resources and sending warning signals to other leaves when pests or diseases threaten. They seem to sense the cog they are in nature’s great big, beautiful machine.
That’s a thing we humans usually aren’t so great at. We have trouble passing the professional baton once our race is run. We clutch and cling to relationships that we know no longer serve us. It is our natural inclination to beg our loved ones to hang around once it comes their time to leave. We’d rather do almost anything than re-leaf.
Not autumn’s show-offs, though. They run toward the final stage with open arms. The chlorophyll moves over and the jewel tones that had been waiting for their time to shine cut loose.
The last leg of the cyclical life loop comes with a rush that’s been earned.
On the sides of mountains in September and October, aspens scream in neon citrus colors, “Look at me!” As they huddle in “stands” (groves so named because of their unified connection to the same giant root) their leaves wiggle as if caught between the pent-up energy of a curtain-call performance and the nerves that preface an impending fall.
Our ecosystem has much to teach us about how to get along—and how to move along when it’s our time to go.