The Red Tree

Next to the UA Memorial Union, just west of the Alumni Plaza fountains, a tree has gone mad with color. This kind of display is not uncommon in New England or in the red maple hills of Wisconsin, but here in the desert, it is a sight.

It leaps off a page filled with cactus greens and tawny dying grasses. It is a diamond in a box of stones. It dances while students drag their feet to last classes of the semester.

And nobody seems to notice.

I saw David Soren, a classics professor and local superstar, walk right past it. I had to stop him to ask if he had seen the tree, and he replied, "No. I was thinking about my lecture."

Yup, me too.

At least I was until I looked up. Seeing it was like being struck by an arrow, or thunder. Synapses of association fired up and down my frontal cortex, my tingling spine. In current parlance, I might whisper O - M - G. So much poignancy in the autumns of my past:. an old truck rolling across Nebraska on the way to Colorado, a picnic lunch on a hill overlooking rolling fields with a woman I loved, solitary moments in the woods while I watched for deer and wondered what I should do with my life.

The cold water splash of memories passed and I resumed my walk to class. 

A wind storm is forecast for the rest of the day. Rain will follow. It will be near freezing tonight.

The leaves will be blowing around on the paving blocks of the Alumni Plaza by tomorrow morning.

The red tree will express flamboyance for a day, for just this morning, for right now, a perfect frame in movie that is over too soon, and then it will go to sleep.

The academic in me knows that the leaves have been cut off from life-giving nectar and no longer photosynthesize. The loss of chlorophyll has revealed the underlying pigment of the now dead leaf tissue. In dying the leaves shimmer in color, no matter who pays attention, or who is struck by the flying arrows of memory.