dancing leaves

[asakiyume]

The oak leaves are starting to fall. If there's even a little breeze, they travel, and they do it by spinning round, like maple-seed helicopters, or by becoming tiny sails and moving straight forward, and sometimes by sashaying side-to-side, like a person enjoying the feel of their hips. They're hard to catch, dipping away just when you think you might grab one: "uh-uh-ohh, no-no!" they seem to say.

There was a family out raking their lawn together: a mother, father, grandmother, and little toddler. The mother clapped a falling oak leaf in her hands and I clapped for her success and gave her the thumbs up, and she smiled and waved.

wakanomori caught a red-oak leaf and asked me to carry it home with me (he was going on a longer run than I was), and on my way back, I caught a white-oak leaf. The various species of red oaks have pointy leaves; the white oaks have rounded ones. Friendship between red and white! (In Japan, those are the two sides that are always fighting each other.)