Every year, sometime in October, I begin listening for the soft, familiar call that whispers from the edges of the season. It’s a tug, a small invitation from the leaves that have begun to fall around me. I don’t gather many. Only the ones that seem to beckon, the ones that pause me in my tracks with their shape or their color or some quiet feeling I can’t quite name.
This year, the ritual began earlier than usual. In September, while I was in Hawaii, a single fig leaf practically placed itself at my feet, broad, warm, a sturdy little platter of cellulose and chlorophyll offering itself. It became my first leaf of the season, my biggest leaf by far, a wide green reminder that autumn begins in the heart long before the Pacific Northwest trees let go of their gold. I slipped it into the center of my sketchbook – this year’s ritual was already underway—my first leaf, but not my last.
The air has cooled, and the days have shortened. Now, I watch the ground as much as the sky, scanning for the leaf that longs to be taken home. I press them carefully—gently, really—inside the heavy books that live on my shelves. There’s comfort in that part, a sense of tending. Each leaf softens into the darkness between pages, held still long enough to dry and flatten. It feels like putting something precious to bed.
Sometimes I draw on them with the fine lines of a pen. Sometimes I paint delicate shapes or add a soft wash of color to follow the veins already mapped out by nature. And sometimes, both. In a way, the leaf offers itself as a canvas—and I accept.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about why this ritual matters to me so much. Why save these fragile things? Why endeavor to extend their beauty when nature has already decided their season is over?
I think the answer lies somewhere between Mary Oliver and Robert Frost.
Mary Oliver wrote, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” (Oliver 104) Every leaf I collect is, I suppose, a moment of attention I’m trying not to lose. A small gesture of saying, I saw you. I noticed your turning, your glow, your brief flare of beauty. I don’t want to rush past the things that move me, especially the fleeting things. And autumn is nothing if not fleeting.
Frost reminds me of that in his poem, “Nothing gold can stay,” (Frost 56). The gold always goes away. The trees always let go. And no matter how much I love the blaze of October, it slips every year into the bare branches of late fall.
This last week of November, the gold has indeed gone to grey, while some rusty veins remain in place. When I step outside, the leaves left on the ground are thin and tired, wet and withered. Their colors have dimmed to clay and mud, their edges giving way to disintegration. They lie like a faded map of the season that’s already slipping behind me.
But when I lift one gently from the driveway, I can still see it, the faint gleam of what it once was. A reminder that beauty doesn’t disappear; it distills. It condenses itself to the essentials. A leaf in late November is a lesson in how to fade with grace.
Maybe that’s part of why I keep gathering them. Maybe I’m preserving not just their beauty, but the lesson inside them. Maybe I’m saving the gold so I can carry it with me a little longer, especially through the dark, damp weeks that lead toward winter.
And maybe—because it is Thanksgiving week—I’m doing it out of gratitude.
Gratitude is often described as a practice, but I like to think of it as a recognition. A turning toward what is good. And each time I pick up a leaf, I feel that small turn inside myself. A recognition of the season I’m moving through. A thank-you for the way the world keeps offering tiny, unexpected gifts.
The leaves remind me to pause. To notice what is underfoot instead of rushing past it. To hold onto the fleeting bits of color and light, not as a way of resisting the dark, but as a way of honoring what was bright.
When I press a leaf between pages, it feels like a gesture of gratitude for everything the year has given me. A way of saying, This mattered. This beauty mattered. And when I later decorate it, turning it into a small piece of art, I’m extending the moment just a bit longer. I’m stretching the gold.
By the time Thanksgiving arrives, the world outside my window is damp, brown, and resigned. But inside, tucked into books or spread on my table, are the leaves that came home with me. The ones that remind me that even in a season of endings, there is still something worth celebrating.
And perhaps that is the heart of this ritual: gratitude for what has already passed, gratitude for what remains, and gratitude for the practice of noticing at all.
Nothing gold can stay, Frost tells us. True. But we can choose to honor the gold while it’s here. We can choose to save a piece of it, not to stop time, but to remember how it felt to walk through the world when everything was glowing.
Frost, Robert. “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” New Hampshire, Henry Holt and Company, 1923, p. 56.
Oliver, Mary. “Yes! No!” New and Selected Poems, Volume One. Beacon Press, 1992, p. 104.