Autumn leaves blow in drifts against curbs and the sides of houses and hills. Raked into piles in yards, they scatter, then meander back together where the wind takes them, cartwheeling.
They are brown and brittle; crunch, crackle and fragment as I walk through them, kick through them, dive in and role through them. For all their noisy protest and my reckless expenditure of energy, it will take me a life-time to make them dust...make them dust so that they disappear underfoot, and blow away to sting eyes and drift on windowsills.
by Josh Gentry