Trees and leaves
A tree is a miracle.
You knew that, of course, but I repeat the oft-stated perception that trees are fabulous and inspiring.
In Autumn we get to see the spectacle of trees shedding the leaves they’ve been maintaining all summer long. They created the leaves out of stuff they pulled out of the earth. In this way a tree is lot smarter than you are. It knows the minerals and organic substances in its environment in a way that you never will, even if you pushed your face into the sod and tried to lick the earth.
It turns those minerals into a structure - trunk, limbs, bark . . . and leaves. It uses the leaves to harvest sunlight. The leaves turn sunlight into energy the same way your intestine turns an eggplant casserole into energy that gets used to support the activites of your soma. What the tree doesn’t use it stores in its roots. It always makes a profit. It uses some of the sun energy to do business and it stashes away the rest because it knows that winter is coming.
As winter approaches, the tree conducts a process of risk management. It knows that the big leaves that generate so much profitable energy during the summer become a significant liability in winter. There is still sunlight in the winter, but the risk-benefit equation is all wrong. Trees have learned that it’s just better not to try to do business with the sun during the winter months. It’s better to close up shop and live off of the surplus generated during the summer because the risks associated with too much weight on the limbs during winter is too great. Real structural damage is possible.
(Other trees have found a strategy for harvesting sunlight during the winter - the evergreens. Take a look at their leaves : thin, long or short needles. Even evergreens shed in autumn, though. You see a carpet of golden needles on the ground as they cut back on their liabilities when winter approaches.)
From our perspective, we see the leaves ‘turn’ - they change from green to red, gold, yellow, brown, and they fall to the ground. With a little breeze you can see the leaves leave their home and drift lightly to the earth. Uncountable numbers of leaves of all sizes fill the air, and fall. They cover the ground with mulch that rots and brings organic matter back to the soil, from which the tree again will create more leaves, maybe two or three years hence.
So, what is life like for the leaf ?
It wakes up one day and finds it has a shape that is unfurling. It feels the energy of the sun waking it up and it finds itself motivated to do what comes naturally : to use the sunlight to feed its growth to full size. To do so, it also draws upon the nourishment provided by the tree. But it finds that even at full size there is still a lot of energy left over, and the tree says, no problem, give it to me and I’ll store it. The tree has invested in this leaf, and now it’s time for the leaf to provide ROI. So for several months the leaf does what leaves do - it turns sunlight into useable energy and the tree stores the surplus energy in its roots. Until the day when the tree sends out a memo “to all leaves”. Due to overly dangerous circumstances we are shutting down our sunlight harvesting operation - you are no longer needed. See your local branch manager for details on time, date, etc., of discontinuation of nutrient flow.
Without nutrients from the tree, the leaf cannot sustain itself anymore - it dies. It loosens its grip on the tree and finally falls away. Lessons learned :
Leaves die because the tree has withdrawn nourishment.
Trees have a purpose separate and apart from their leaves.
Trees create leaves to serve their needs and they discard them without remorse when the time comes. Having created them they are within their rights to discard them. The leaf is not an individual in its own right but a part of the tree. (I can see certain interests using this as an analog for “job creation and job destruction”. Looking into that is another topic for another time.)
Leaves are ephemeral to trees as trees are ephemeral to geology.
There is, however, a more salient point : a tree is an intelligent system. Within the limitations of its situation a tree demonstrates a profound level of intelligence. Seeing the vast intelligence there should remind us that we ourselves possess an even greater magnitude of awareness without even considering “education”. We are born very, very smart.
My neighbors' famous "little hill"
More Winter Fun
Well, the storm that is not peripheral decided to come to town today. Starting at about noon we began to see significant accumulations around our building here in Silver Spring. We made our usual trip to Annapolis to do weekly shopping - early - and most of the way home before running into a traffic jam getting off of the freeway and on to New Hampshire Ave. About 1/3 of the travel time was getting half a kilometer onto the exit.
Near our building there is another little hill, a bit steeper than the one next door, which leads down to New Hampshire Ave., and the challenge this time was not getting up that hill to get home but getting around the mini van which was not able to navigate the hill. Fortunately, I had found this work-around several years back when I drove home from Penn State in a veritable blizzard.
We came up an alternate street where the incline was quite a bit less and there was no traffic at all. This storm is not supposed to let up until the wee-small hours of Sunday morning, and - just to stay consistent for bizarreness of our weather this season - its last several hours of life will be as rain and freezing rain.
I wouldn’t really care, but Alana needs to get to a meeting in West Virginia Sunday afternoon and, of course, up there that will all be snow. Who knows what the roads will look like ?
So - it’s nice to get something that decisively looks like a storm (even with the caveat at the end), but I dread facing the mountain roads in West Virginia tomorrow afternoon.
Puny mayhem
Some kind of arctic blast blew through here at around 8:00 p.m. “What’s going on outside the window ?” Alana asks.
“How do I know ? I’m in the kitchen,” I respond.
Wander over to the door on to the lanai and now I see what she means. Visibility zero. It looks like a snow blower - I’ve never seen weather like this in my life. Reminds me of the winter storm scene from “March of the Penguins."
After midnight now and the temperature has dropped to -8C, heading for a low of -13C overnight, and the puny amount of snow that got deposited early in the evening has turned the neighboring apartment complex into the Ice Capades.
Seriously, there is a Montgomery County fire truck that cannot get up the little hill that always gives our neighbors trouble when it hasn’t been salted. This is a really little hill, honestly - maybe a 5 degree incline. But when it’s covered with ice it might as well be Mount Everest.
This is the way the whole season has been - occasional freak storms that create havoc out of ridiculous metrics - this is less than an inch of snow but it’s brought traffic accidents and mayhem.
I can’t imagine what it must be like in Boston.
No power outage so far, thank goodness, despite the 60 mph winds which just keep coming.
One more shot of Aquavit, I think, before I call it a night.