The first falling leaf of fall came down on a Tuesday, and Marta Szymanski noticed it because she noticed everything now that she had decided to die.
She was sitting on the back steps of the house on Oleander Street with her morning coffee going cold, watching the maple at the fence line. The leaf—one single yellow leaf—peeled away from a high branch and turned slow circles on the way down, unhurried, like it had somewhere to be but no particular rush about getting there. It landed in the dry grass and lay still.
She watched it for a long time.
Marta was seventy-one years old. Her husband Tomas had died in March. Her daughter lived in Tucson and called on Sundays with a bright, anxious voice that exhausted them both. The doctor had found something in her left lung that he described, with careful professional gentleness, as “a situation we’ll want to monitor.” She had decided—not in a dramatic moment, not weeping into a pillow, but calmly, over several weeks the way you decide to repaint the kitchen—that she would not monitor it. She would not do any of the things that came after monitoring. She would let the situation be a situation and she would live out what remained in the house where she had lived for forty-three years and she would not make it anyone else’s problem.
It had seemed, until that Tuesday morning, like a reasonable plan.
She set down her coffee cup and walked to the maple tree. She picked up the leaf.
It was not particularly beautiful. Yellowed at the edges, a little ragged where something had been chewing at it all summer. A small brown spot near the stem, a crack running from the tip. She turned it over in her fingers. The veins on the underside were finer than she remembered leaves being—she must not have looked closely in a long time.
She carried it inside.
She did not know why. She set it on the kitchen table next to the sugar bowl and made fresh coffee and stood looking at it while the machine worked.
Tomas would have laughed at her. He would have said, Marta, it is a leaf, what is wrong with you. He had been a practical man, an affectionate man, a man who fixed things rather than thought about them, and she had loved him for forty-seven years with a love that had become so much a part of the architecture of her daily life that his absence did not feel like grief so much as structural damage. Walls standing, roof intact, but nothing quite level anymore. You set something down and it slides.
She drank the fresh coffee. She looked at the leaf.
After a while she went to the hall closet and got down the box from the top shelf. It was a shoebox—Tomas’s last pair of dress shoes had come in it, the ones they’d bought for their granddaughter’s christening. She had kept the box without thinking about why. Inside it now was nothing: just the clean smell of new leather faintly remaining, and tissue paper.
She put the leaf inside and set the box on the kitchen table.
Then she went and got her reading glasses and a notepad, the kind with the wire spiral at the top that she used for grocery lists, and she sat down and wrote at the top of the first page: LEAF. MAPLE. FIRST OF THE FALL. TUESDAY.
She looked at what she’d written. Added: THE CRACK GOES FROM TIP NEARLY TO CENTER. THE SPOT IS THE COLOR OF WEAK TEA.
She put the pen down. Picked it up again. Added: TOMAS WOULD HAVE LAUGHED.
She did not cry. She was past crying in the way you get past a neighborhood you used to live in—you know every street, you could find your way blind, but it doesn’t pull at you the same.
She made toast and ate it standing at the counter looking out the window at the maple.
Wednesday brought nothing from the tree, but she found a crow feather near the back gate, black with a shimmer of green in it when she angled it toward the light. She added it to the box. Wrote: CROW FEATHER. NEAR GATE. GREENISH. ABOUT FOUR INCHES. She thought about what else and added: REMINDED ME OF THE DRESS I WORE THE NIGHT TOMAS PROPOSED. THE GREEN ONE WITH THE BUTTONS. I WONDER WHERE THAT DRESS WENT.
Thursday there was a walnut from the neighbor’s tree that had rolled under the fence. Friday, a moth wing, just the one, translucent as old skin. Saturday, nothing—she walked the whole yard twice and found nothing worth keeping, and sat with the box open on her lap feeling something she had to think about before she named it. Disappointed. She was disappointed. She had wanted to find something.
That seemed important, so she wrote it down: FOUND NOTHING TODAY. WANTED TO. STRANGE TO WANT A THING.
Sunday her daughter called. The bright, anxious voice, the responsible questions, the how are you eating, how are you sleeping, I’ve been looking at flights. Marta said what she always said. Fine, fine, you don’t need to do that. After she hung up she sat for a long time and then got the notepad and turned to a fresh page and wrote her daughter’s name, Jana, at the top. She sat with the pen in her hand for ten minutes. Then she wrote: SHE IS FRIGHTENED OF LOSING ME. SHE HAS BEEN FRIGHTENED OF THIS SINCE SHE WAS SIX. I USED TO THINK IT WAS A WEAKNESS. I THINK NOW IT IS JUST LOVE WITH NOWHERE TO PUT ITSELF.
She looked at that for a long time.
Monday she found two things: a piece of blue glass worn smooth by years of something—weather, or feet, or the simple grinding patience of time—and a small gray stone with a white line running through it perfectly straight, as if someone had drawn it with a ruler. She held the stone for a long while in her palm. The white line was quartz, she supposed. She was not a geologist. She wrote: THE LINE IN THE STONE LOOKS INTENTIONAL BUT IS NOT. OR MAYBE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS OVER ENOUGH TIME LOOKS INTENTIONAL. I DON’T KNOW. TOMAS WOULD HAVE SAID I WAS MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED.
She paused and added: HE WOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT.
By the end of the second week the box held: fourteen leaves in varying colors and conditions, three feathers, two stones, one walnut, the moth wing, the blue glass, a cicada shell, a bottlecap so old the printing had worn to ghost letters, and a small piece of red ribbon that she found caught on the fence post and that she had no explanation for at all.
The notepad was half full.
She was sleeping better. She did not connect these facts at first, and then she did.
She had not solved anything. The situation in her left lung was still a situation. Tomas was still dead. The walls of the house were still slightly off-plumb. But in the mornings now she got up with a specific curiosity about what the yard might have produced overnight, what small thing she would carry inside and hold up to the light and try to find the right words for. It was not happiness. She was honest with herself; it was not happiness. It was more like the feeling of a task that fits the hands.
The third Tuesday, three weeks after the first leaf, she called Jana.
Not Sunday. Tuesday, in the middle of the afternoon.
Jana answered on the second ring with a voice that went careful and still the way it did when she was afraid of what came next. Mom? You okay?
Marta said: I want to tell you about a box I’ve been putting things in.
There was a silence. Then Jana said, okay, and her voice had changed—softened, gone off its guard—and Marta could hear her settling somewhere, getting comfortable, making room.
So Marta told her. The leaf, the feather, the stone with the white line. The ribbon she couldn’t explain. She read some of what she’d written in the notepad. When she got to the part about the green dress with the buttons, Jana said, I remember that dress, and her voice went a little strange, and Marta thought: she remembers a thing I thought was only mine. How many things like that are there. How many things have I thought were only mine.
She didn’t say any of this out loud. She filed it to write down later.
They talked for an hour and ten minutes. When they hung up, Jana said she was coming in October and Marta said: good, the yard will have more for the box by then, you can help me look.
After she set down the phone she stood in the kitchen in the afternoon light, which came through the window at a low fall angle and lay in rectangles on the floor like something placed there deliberately. The box was on the table. The notepad was beside it. She picked up the pen.
Wrote: THE THINGS I THOUGHT WERE ONLY MINE ARE NOT ONLY MINE.
Looked at the maple through the window. A few more leaves had come loose while she’d been on the phone and were settling into the grass.
She would go out and get them in a while. She was not in a rush. She put the pen down and let the light do what it was doing to the floor, and she breathed, and she was there.
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