One night in early November several years ago, the temperature in my yard dropped to the middle 20s. At 8:30 in the morning, I looked out the back door as the sun was coming up, and I saw the leaves of my white mulberry tree starting to fall.
I was excited because I had kept sporadic track of that particular tree’s history, 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, in gusts, for almost an hour. At 9:30 the tree was bare, and the ground was covered with gold.
Trying to understand what I’d witnessed, I went out and counted the number of leaves in a square foot sections beneath the tree: 65 leaves large and small filled the space. I measured the area which held most of the newly fallen leaves: 55 by 40 feet.
I multiplied, came up with 2,200 square feet, multiplied that times 65 leaves per square foot. So....I had seen something in the neighborhood of 143,000 leaves that had come down. Give or take maybe 50,000. Divided by 50 minutes of watching, and I came up with about 3,000 leaves a minute.
Now as to the practical value of such imprecise calculations, I can say that counting these leaves was one way to understand that leaves are uncountable.
And also I found that counting leaves was a way to touch the elusive and incalculable movements of time.
Did it help me come to terms with the winter that lay ahead? In a way, it did.
And it has ever since.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will's Almanack. I'll be back again next week with more notes on the seasons. In the meantime, why not count leaves? Do the existential exercise. Touch and contemplate the time.
