The leaves remind me.

Seven years I have walked or driven along Terwilliger Boulevard almost every day. Thin Oregon Ash line the southern sidewalk for a stretch of several blocks, from the Subway shop on down to my turn at Alice. Most of each year they stand thick with green leaves rustled by spring and summer breeze, slick with rain, or bare and stark through gray winter.

Yet, when I close my eyes and picture these trees I see the briefest palette between life and death, the process botanists call abscission. The shedding of leaves. Every color of a campfire blazes over the trees as they push off their leaves to save energy through coming winter.

These few weeks express the machination of shorter days, cool nights, chlorophylls, sugars, and photosynthesis. I could know all of the biology at work or none of it. This time would remain my favorite.

As I see more autumns I have the sense my life passes faster and faster. I come to appreciate the sights of transition more than I used to.

I realize that sounds as though it comes naturally. Fact is, I have to remind myself to enjoy the leaves, to stare a little longer. So often we forget. So many times we continue forward through life eyes cast downward while passing beauty, need, opportunity, or connection.

Trees this time of year stand along the boulevard like a mural in progress, each morning the colors painted over slightly different than the day before like the artist has layered on more color in translucent oils. Each afternoon sun shines through brighter red and softer orange. Yellows drape the trees like a pot of paint poured overtop to trickle down through leaves and drip gold onto the road, planting strip, and sidewalk below.

The yellow becomes a carpet with hints of brown curling up their edges and stems fading toward a woody hue. It makes me want to hurry through them shuffling my feet, not in silence, but with a childish shriek, a whoop, a holler. Some expression of the thrill.

Can I remember the last time I did this? Ran through leaves? Not even.

The moments are too fleeting to spur much change beyond the noticing. Yet, I drink the colors in a little more this season. I take longer glances or put the phone back in my pocket long enough to soak up a bit more. I think it’s because I have a son now. I want for him to spend time outdoors, to think of himself as of the outdoors. Comfortable here, dirty, playful, natural. I want him to run through piles of leaves and I suppose I want to be the kind of dad who does this with his son.

The colors pass quickly, abscission but a fleeting moment in the year. The leaves remind me.

Appreciate them now. We may get a next year and another and another. Until we don’t.

Do not skirt the beauty, but instead run through it.