Fall is all around me. Today is the kind of day for me when I notice the leaves on my windshield as my mind is slowed in recollection and introspection. I am barely aware of the traffic because my eyes, askew, have settled on the leaves stuck in my wiper blades. The leaves spinning around my car are dancing so slowly in my mind that I wonder if they have strings and are being puppetted about me. Maybe they have always been the result of a grand orchestration that I am only now attuned enough to see.

Leaves in pairs are the most intriguing to me. They are more elegant than those that swirl about alone, but their grace comes from the play between the two, not from one leaf or the other. Some leaves have a partner in flight for but a moment. The dance is short, but always magnificent. It is the kind of splendor that cannot be maintained and thus, an invisible hand soon pulls them apart to follow separate and winding paths. Occasionally you will see leaves return to one another, but it soon becomes clear that it is merely coincidence. We find it to be a matter of a change in atmosphere or weather. They dance again, but no longer are they the pair. They now are simply sharing the same space.

Other leaves that you find in pairs are the kind that have fit together from the moment they collided. They find themselves stuck to one another, soon combining into one that slowly ceases to fly. Their lust for the wind has been overcome by the practicality that, as one, they are too heavy to flutter as they used to. These leaves rest upon the ground until the day that they are finally turned to dust by nature or man. Never apart, these two disintegrate together.

Most of us spend our days fluttering about by ourselves or intertwined with another. Occasionally we share a moment in the wind with one that makes us spin and dash about in completely harmonious play. Just as easily as it begins, we part, and perhaps spend the rest of our days hoping to drift into that same space again and share that same moment. As we flutter and hope, as we drift out of place, we know that the winds have already carried away the spirit that puppetted us in just such a way. We hopelessly intertwine in a million other dances looking for that one that tangles and brings us softly to the ground. Sad are those that realize that some partners can only last for that one brief gust around the schoolyard.