The Lovely Bones

10 Beautiful Things

9. Dry Leaves

There are no leaves in Arizona. There are stubby green things that yellow and fall off in a carpet of crackling wildfire-risk, but there are no leaves.

I think if everything in the world died and I was the only one left, I would miss leaves the most. On vacation to the East Coast in autumn, the trees were orange and red and yellow as if on fire. Then when the leaves fell, people walked on them. A leaf would become brown and wrinkled, desiccated, and shoes would crunch it into the pavement. Once it wasn't bright and golden, it was worthless. All the life was gone from it. There is nothing pretty about death.

And yet there are monuments to the dead. Great bronze statues immortalizing those who have gone before, who have done something that no one else did. Names, carved in neat lines into metal and stone. That is death, too. So why don't we shy away from it?

I remember freshman year of high school, the buses would stop at two schools. At the second, I sat in my seat staring out the window. All the trees along the side of the bus pick up lane shed their tiny green stubs at the same time. The gutters clogged with little bits of yellow from the flowers-that-aren't, to be swept away over the weekend. Then the dead things would fall again and the cycle repeated itself.

When there was wind, it picked up the leaves. They danced in eddies, sometimes falling, sometimes drifting away, somewhere else, somewhere not here. Even though they were dead, they went places. The world picked them up again.

Then in other places, where the trees dropped their leaves in great piles to wade through. Those leaves barely moved in the slightest breeze. A lot of those leaves are never picked up. They grow brown with age and disintegrate slowly until the winter snows cover them. When the snow clears again, they are gone. All things dead get buried eventually. No one remembers the leaves of the last autumn, only this one.

I think dry leaves are beautiful, strange as that may seem to those who acquaint beauty with glamour and makeup. But leaves on a tree are pretty, things to be smiled at and admired from afar. Dry leaves are ground beneath the soles of hundreds of shoes. Dry leaves are buried by snow and dry up in the sunshine. They become uninteresting and flat, slivers of the past trampled beneath the present. But they are broken up and become dirt and ash and fertilizer. We walk on dry leaves. We breathe them in. All the time we sweep them away into neat piles, we are creating order out of chaos. Life from the bones.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it” (The Lovely Bones 320).