Autumn’s Determined Intruders

At my front door one September morning, I saw a small leaf stuck to the glass at my eye level. It was a pale yellow leaflet from one of the honey locust trees that have been planted along the main street in town. The thornless honey locust is often planted beside sidewalks and parking lots to add a little touch of green because it can thrive in areas of urban stress. In botanist-speak, the leaves are bipinnately compound with 14 to 26 leaflets. (Did someone actually count the leaflets on a thousand thousand leaves to find an average?) The leaflet is lanceolate with a serrated margin. The leaf itself is up to 20 centimetres long and the leaflets two centimetres long, more or less. 

They start changing colour as August turns into September and sunlight wanes. Their yellow autumn hue reflects the sunshine for those few days when all the leaves remain attached to the branches, but once they start to fall, the leaflets separate from the leaf and huddle together in the gutter, over storm sewer grates, or mashed into messy brown and yellow on the sidewalk with bare leaf stems sticking out at all angles. 

This fate is a scruffy contrast to the honey locust’s posh neighbours around the corner from my home in Orangeville. Walnut trees, for instance, are sturdy and tall, standing firmly in their ground. As days shrink, scurries of squirrels hang on their hind feet at the ends of small branches, reaching for the ready fruit. 

With nuts in their forepaws, they squat on wide branches, with bushy tails curved over their backs and heads, as they bite through the bitter green endocarp to reach the sweet seed at the centre. The ground around the tree is festooned with bits of discarded walnut shells. 

Halfway up Second Street, there’s a red oak tree more than 200 years old. It was already a mature tree when Jesse Ketchum, an early Orangeville settler, was planning the street grid north of Broadway. Its autumn leaves are the glorious colour of red wine.

There are sugar maples, too, that reach up into the sky from roots that have anchored them for well over a century. The brilliant red maple leaves stop drivers in their tracks and compel property owners to gather them in crisp, colourful piles for kids and dogs (and occasional grown-ups) to jump in and hide. This is a far cry from the fate of the honey locust leaflets that fall along Broadway. However, there are a few more venturesome and determined.

Each year these ambitious few seek a better fate and make valiant efforts to get past my front door, up the stairs and into the apartment. I think they’re looking for a warm place to weather the coming cold. They gather on the sidewalk right in front of the door or perch on the mailbox, hoping for a gust of wind as the door opens. Some even try to get through the screens on upstairs windows.

Was that leaflet that stuck to my door just having a look? Or was it trying to get inside? Many of its cohorts do. Step through and the floor can be strewn with leaves that have made it past the first hurdle – the front door. They gather there, resting perhaps, gaining strength for the trek up the stairs – a straight run of 18 steps.

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They have no means of self-propulsion … they can’t walk, slither or swim … so they must rely on a wet shoe, a deep tread on a winter boot, or a fuzzy sock for their serrated margins to latch onto. But they make it, nonetheless. Look down the stairs toward the door in October and the stairs are often strewn with little leaflets, struggling upward.

Not all, but many do make it to the top. I have found them throughout the apartment – in front of the couch, on the ottoman, under the printer on my desk, tucked into odd corners, perhaps trying to evade the vacuum cleaner. One of them has even found its way into my shoe.

Some are even more determined and even more worthy of admiration … those leaflets I see coming up from the parking lot at the back. You see, my home is in a row of buildings built a century or more ago, with retail on the main floor and apartments or offices above. For these leaves to get to the back requires considerable determination and exertion.

There are no honey locusts behind the building or anywhere else close by, so somehow these little leaflets must go around – or over – the building and then climb the back stairs. Maybe they ride the wind, maybe they hitch a lift on a squirrel. I have seen heaps of walnut leftovers on the back steps, so I know the squirrels drop by. I don’t know how many leaflets make it all the way up – there are 22 steps back there – but some do. I’ve seen them inside the back door. And I do have to admire their gumption.