Asakiyume mita

Thin and sharp, edges honed to keen points?

Broad and wide, a surface on which others may place their needs, but a bit battered and stained?

Round and open-lobed, expansively and graciously symmetrical?

Anemone-like, your parts drifting across each other, more to you than you can account for or control?

(Feel free to respond with a different oak leaf that represents you today)

Neighbors were talking about when leaves fall (some early, some late), and one said, "My father always used to say about oak leaves, 'They don't like to fall until they smell the [Thanksgiving] turkey in the oven.'"

(Some hang on longer; they wait until the next generation come along and give them a push.)

Also: catch a falling leaf and you can make a wish, but what if a falling leaf catches you, and hangs on? This happened to me the other day. Does it get a wish?

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.)