Changing

It is fall.

There, among the rough, beige-grey-brown of the eternally-constant evergreens, maple. It grows there by a fallen pine whose kinked and bone-white branches scribble along the angled trunk. On its other side is the front right fender of an old car that is almost completely rust-colored, windows all long gone, tires flat and falling into the ground, various side panels and hood pieces loose, bent, or just plain missing.

The car sinks, turning browner all the time. The white tree leans more as months pass, its wood becoming lighter and more brittle. The maple is alive. It leans Southward, as if reaching face, hands, arms, soul toward the life of the sun that throbs across the sky every day.

In the quiet of the sparse trees here in this corner of my parents' property, surrounded with old and lifeless cars, a sagging fence marking this land from that neighbor's land, the maple grows. The maple sees another season leave, another come, and changes garments to flourish in the new one. It reaches forward, glad to golden and wave and wane here among the death of ancient Chevrolets and fallen evergreens, reaching content for this quiet death that will be overthrown in spring.