Fallen Leaves by Lydia Fazio Theys
Beneath the tallest, oldest oak, the piles are not as deep, as if most of the golden leaves drift down, then rush to ride the wind to freedom. Through the hay meadow—yellow-washed with October sunshine and dotted with cricket song–I chase my little daughter, sweet childhood memories dancing and running beside me. I watch her toddle and fall, toddle and fall, through each crunchy mound of crisp autumn-jewel leaves.
Now, I take Annie’s hand and offer a cookie picnic under that ancient oak, the one I called my own growing up. Sitting, I open a small towel onto the ground and reveal four of my own mother’s fragrant ginger cookies. I rest against the rough solid trunk and tilt my head back, as I’ve done so many times before. I slide down to lean against the very part of the tree that held me as a child. Lulled by the song of a nearby cricket, sharp and strong against the fuzzy background chirping, I close my eyes. I melt away and for the briefest moment, I’m six again, when I savored the beauty of this place without caring that the coming white winter would inevitably sap its color. For a slippery instant, I’m back where time before the now has no meaning, and time after is infinite, where everything I discover will last forever.
I open my eyes to Annie’s shriek and the sudden silence of the cricket. Annie sits, stubby legs in a wide V, looking like a cat more surprised than pleased to get the canary. She pushes her right hand close to my face, and between her fingers, I glimpse a large brown cricket. I take her chubby arm and turn it to see the top of her fist, where two long, quivery antennae protrude. Perhaps it is the squirming or the powerful push of insect legs pinching her soft baby palm, but Annie shrieks again and begins waving her left arm in quick, jerky movements. With a gentle squeeze to her wrist, I look her in the eye, smile and peel her fingers open. The frightened creature jumps away, and Annie squeals, shaking both splay-fingered hands in front of her chest–a wind-up toy releasing a quick burst of energy.
“Cricket,” I say. “Annie made friends with a cricket.” The excitement over, she lays her head in my lap and I close my eyes again, playing with that one lock of baby-satin hair that always falls onto her forehead. But I can’t get back to the comforting place I reached before. The regular chirping begins again, this time further away, almost wistful, a plaintive call for a mate before the first frost. If we come back next year, Annie and I, will we capture one of his offspring? How many of the crickets in this field right now are his brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews? Were the crickets I caught in this same spot more than twenty years ago long-gone members of his family tree?
I open my eyes. I’ll never know, never be able to reel in time and see the connections and the patterns in all the small things around me. No more than I can hover for more than a tantalizing instant in the times and places of my past. No more than I can gather the leaves around me and whoosh them back up the branches that once cradled them when they were young and tender. Before they ran away.
Lydia Fazio Theys lives in Connecticut with her husband and their Noah-like mixture of two great big children, two crotchety cats and two Italian Greyhounds. Woodland creatures often wander in uninvited and stay for varying lengths of time. Lydia’s work has appeared in or on flashquake, Opium, Yankee Pot Roast, Gator Springs Gazette, Moondance, Quintessence, Somewhat, Mad Hatter’s Review, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Quiction, HeavyGlow, All Things Girl, several anthologies, KRCB public radio, and even a coffee mug. The Junction Dance Theater in Pittsburgh used one of her flashes as inspiration for a dance.
