Leaf Dance

Leaf dance
by Punam Khaira Sidhu

It’s that time of the year when winter has all but faded and spring is in the air. It’s when deciduous trees and shrubs shed their foliage to stand tall in all their bare-bodied glory of strong branches and sturdy trunks. Tiny buds soon arrive heralding the onset of spring and the long hot summer ahead.

Piles of leaves mound the roadsides: brown, beige, red, golden, caramel, rust, toffee, chocolate, the colours of rest and hibernation. The wind comes along lifting them up. Golden brown leaves, wrinkled yet crackling with energy. The leaves dance along the roads. Briefly, each gust of wind carrying the little piles up in a charming dance.

My heart dances too, at one with the leaves, and very briefly I am transported to a garden that is seeped in memories of tenderness. My grandmother’s garden comes alive. The leaves dancing oh so merrily and us little ones tumbling into the piles raked neatly by the gardener for leaf manure.

Why do leaves change colour, grandma? I remember asking. Grandma, one of the first five women graduates in the undivided Panjab usually, had an answer for everything. First would come the lesson in biology. Leaves get their green colour from chlorophyll, a pigment that enables them to process sunlight, I remember being told. Usually the chlorophyll pigment dominates and makes leaves look green. When chlorophyll moves from the leaves to the branches, trunk, and roots, the yellow and orange pigments that are always present become visible.

“Trees,” said my grandma, “like us need to store as many nutrients as they can to enable rejuvenation in spring.” Throughout the winter, trees accumulate Carotenoids (sugars) and anthocyanins (phosphates). As sugar accumulates, the leaves turn brighter red. Red colour is nature’s sunscreen. It shades the chlorophyll so it doesn’t break down and thereby conserves the supply needed to put forth fresh foliage.

In the newly sprung foliage, the red pigments of the anthocyanins shade sensitive photosynthetic tissue while trees reabsorb nutrients from their leaves to put forth new growth.

Biology lesson over, it was usually time for grandma to transport us to a world peopled by little people like us: Brownies, Elves, Fairies and all those denizens of an enchanted world so far removed from the fantasy worlds of today’s children peopled by weaponry and bloodthirsty assassins in games such as Counterstrike.

In that enchanted tale the Brownies rode down from their abode in the trees, astride the golden brown leaves to attend midsummer-night feasts and spring soirees. My grandmother usually exhorted us to go find a Brownie and hold him tight until he granted us a wish.

And at this time of the year part of me always peers surreptitiously under the dancing leaves hoping to spot an elusive Brownie. Perhaps I haven’t quite stopped hoping that I will find one who will trade me a wish for his freedom. And so I watch the leaves tumbling in a wild abandon of gold and rust, and my heart dances along too.