As the gentle breeze passed, every little, green leaf on every branch of the pecan tree was affected. There was one leaf in particular on the tree that swayed along with the other leaves that dripped from their petioles and bathed in the melted gold that was sun.
This leaf, in fact, lived on the very edge of one of the branches.
“How wonderful I am, for being a leaf,” thought it.
It was at this moment, when the soft wind ever so lightly grazed the tender, young leaf, its abscission layer gave way, and down, down, down floated the leaf. Very slowly, it floated, that you would think that time had slowed an extreme amount. And the leaf, in all its omniscient beauty, just waited. It thought that maybe it was flying.
“How wonderful I am, that I can fly,” thought the leaf.
But the leaf did not fly up, only deeper down the trunk of the tree that used to be its safe haven. The only sound in that particular moment was a whippoorwill cooing softly in the distance. But never curious was the leaf. In all of its ignorance and in all of its innocence, it did not know that it would land on the ground to decompose along with all of the other fallen leaves. A gave yard it was, below the pecan tree, for leaves who had faced this very same tragedy.
Soon, the floating was coming to a bitter end and the leaf was about to land in the grass where the wind would perhaps become harsher and carry the leaf even farther away from all it has ever known. But the leaf, being a leaf, never thought as much. Its only thought before its midrib end touched a single blade of grass:
“How wonderful I am.”
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