When Not to be Thrifty

Three mornings a week, I meet the now bundled grounds workers as I walk back from the pool, watching them as they blow leaves off the sidewalks in a futile effort to keep them clear for the next ten users, no, for their own feet on windy days.

It's almost as if I must race the busy-bodies out in the mornings in order to feel the leaves under my feet and to see them sprawled and scuttling across the cold grass and cement. Each morning I fear that they will have stolen my wealth before my eyes can feast on it again, but as yet, the enormity of the task seems to have stumped them--they dare not touch the golden tree next to Nethery, the circle of color beneath it a witness of the thousands of leaves it burst forth in the spring, bore through the summer, and now bequeaths to the grass-loving bugs as their part of the inheritance, casually tinkling the golden plates as if they are common, as if they are only flecks of fools gold some child might be attracted to.

I durst not think I am the only one who benefits from such prodigality, and yet one does have to beat the darkness-blinded leaf-blowers to the leaves, just as one must dash in front of the wind to the sky before it gusts away the morning-pink clouds in order to feel them deeply...

Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about taking time as a child to stop and pick up pennies as small treasures of wealth, enjoy them, and then go hide them for someone else to find--what a rebuke to my hoarding self. Shall I not begin to expose my pocketed coins to the world? Perhaps I will begin by taping a bunch of golden leaves to my window, that others too might find themselves not rained upon with snow, but with brightness.