Joan Leotta

A Dry Leaf 
 
In the grocery store parking lot, one recent afternoon, I spotted a brown, papery item on proud display on the dashboard of an older, blue Honda Civic. At first glance it appeared to be a large, single, curled-up, dried leaf. Wondering if my eyes had deceived me, I stepped closer. Yes, it was a dry leaf, brown, rounded in on itself so tightly I could not discern maple from oak or sycamore. I wondered at first “What would make a common dead leaf  important enough to merit such prominently display? Was it from a favorite tree?” Then I stepped away, into the store, to attend to my grocery list. 
 
As I rolled through the aisles, I pondered my own relationship with dried brown leaves, curled or straight, windblown on a path or lawn. Even a single leaf blown onto my path, crackles with remembered laughter when I walk through or step on them. It’s my son’s laughter that resounds in my ears as when he ran, his feet crushing and scattering dried leaves with all the delight a toddler could effuse. 
 
When I returned to my car, I saw that the blue Civic and its curled dry leaf were gone. On subsequent visits, I’ve looked for the car, but it’s never reappeared. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if the leaf’s significance for blue Civic was like mine, a portkey to a past (for me) when my son was alive and would run into my arms still laughing after dispersing the fallen leaves with his tiny feet. Lately, however, I’ve become skittish about  even if I do see the blue Civic again—not for fear of encountering another grieving parent but because the owner might answer,  “Leaf?  I guess the wind blew it into the car when I last opened the door.” I don’t think I could bear the weight of a dry leaf that has no meaning.
 
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Whispering Hope
 
My father’s birth village was on a mountain in the Abruzzo. When we visited, on a late May afternoon, our car carefully climbed roads with no guardrails. Our tires hugged the part closest to the mountainside farthest from the scenic views. At last we stopped in a place where there was a cut-out that would keep us safe from passing trucks, looked down on trees, mostly bare, some still glazed with white, made and then photographed the mound of spring snowballs we’d made.
 
In Pittsburgh, we lived at the bottom of a hill, a hill I climbed when the roads were closed because of snow and ice and sledded down when there was no danger of careening into traffic. To reach the home of my Nonna, I had to climb one hundred steps (or so it seemed). Steep climbs are a part of me, so it is no surprise that I feel a kinship with mountain dwellers everywhere.
 
In our North Carolina home we lived with a river in my back yard, water that rose into the drive, penetrated the back rubber floor guard of our garage. Our rescue was easy—from large State-owned vehicles—the land was flat, easy for them to get to us. Afterwards, cleaning services came to erase the stink of foul mud from our property, even though the memory remained. Not so with the mountain folks, who have suffered the winds and ice of winter, lived through the green of spring and summer, only to be betrayed in what is normally their glorious season of ruby and citron leaves calling to visitors, betrayed by rain and wind and raging waters. Rivers that meandered through villages became behemoths, swallowing these places whole.
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Chimney Rock and Bat Cave, Asheville, Swannanoa, places in Tennessee and southwest Virginia, places all along the misty Blue Ridge, crushed by water wielding trees and rocks and debris like weapons to take back the land from the people.

My tears push me to action for they are not distant from me—and although , as far as I know, my father’s town has never suffered so, water is everywhere and the possibility of disaster is equal to the possibility for joy no matter where one lives—so I must help in the only way I can—writing, telling stories, sending a check to those who are young enough to slough through the foul mud and bring supplies, bring out survivors. I, from here,  whisper words of hope to those whose lives were swept down the mountain that is so like the one where my father was born.

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Nightmare Voices
 
Anyone who heard him call out for help as he clung to the tree while the river swirled around his place of safety, water lapping against the bark like the paws of a rabid bear trying to pull him down and into its grand maw, those who tried to save him, those who cried for him on the bank—all of these likely hear his cries in their nightmares. As for me, my body was not there but my mind traveled to him, like the dream figures in a Chagall painting, and his cries like brushes dipped in sorrowful black paint notes of screams into my ears each night, as if I had heard them with my own waking ears. I still hear the voices of the Hamas victims, of children caught int eh war in Gaza, of Holocaust victims who died before I was born, even voices of victims of Johnstown flood and the Titanic. All these still call to me in the ripples of every river, every stream, waves that roll up onto the beach. This is the poet’s blessing and curse—to be haunted by terrors in the tenor of voices in trees, in our sleep, and even in our waking hours, for as much as we fell joy, are compelled to share joy with words on paper, so we feel the pain even of voices no longer heard by others, both in our dreams and waking hours and share those voices on paper not simply for the art, but to give help others hear those voices, to ensure that they are not forgotten. We hear them all and it is our duty that with our pens we make them known.

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Listening to Crow’s Morning Call
 
On our last morning of beach week my sunrise walk was primarily a watching  exercise.

Waves were foamy curls riding across the water from the horizon line to my toes on shore as if sent by the rising sun to meet me, carry shells to shore as gifts.

This was a calm day, ocean’s roll, the occasional call of a gull or sandpiper were expected background noise, but I hardly noticed even those as I focused on the sand in my hunt for shells.

Then an unexpected, “Caw, Caw!” sounded out and made me turn—a crow at the beach?

I turned. I saw him in his black robed majesty, sitting on the top of a rental beach chair, a visiting crow, beak still expelling his harsh call.
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I smiled at him, turned away, and took a few more steps down the sand.
 
A songbird’s melodious trill floated over to me. Turning I saw only the crow. Had he imitated a songbird? I smiled. Walked on. Then, as plainly as one could hear such on a playground a child’s voice called, “Look at me!” “Look at me!”

Again I turned and this time I laughed. Crow, yes, crow, that consummate mimic had finally hit the language that made me listen, not simply hear, and go on.
 
I waved, smiled, walked a few steps toward him and spoke: “Hello Mr. Crow. You look very fine today.”

Acknowledging my compliment, he bobbed his head. He had wanted to be noticed and had called me until I did, choosing first his own language, then songbird speech, and finally the words of a human child. As I walked on, I wondered, how much better would the world be if like crow we could shift until we found a language that would reach another, cause us to listen, not simply hear the noise of their voices.

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Camellias
 
I will miss my “winter’s roses.” Their profusion of pink, red, white petals scattered over mulch, grass yellowed by lack of rain, made carpets of colour that spread to the sidewalk when chilly breezes spread them about—like tea leaves swirling in my cup, in too hot water, scattered by the bubbling hot liquid, tea I drink to stave off the cold.
 
How appropriate that camellias, albeit different types than those of my North Carolina garden, are the plants that offer their leaves for tea. Now, in my Virginia home, bereft of flowering plants but enjoying snowflakes covering my lawn, I will recall the pastel and deep red beauty of those bushes in my former yard as I brew cups of tea to warm me against a more frigid clime. Cold has many faces but tea’s a constant.

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Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Internationally published as essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist, she’s a two-time nominee (fiction and poetry) for Pushcart and Best of the Net, nominee for Western Peace Prize, and a 2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Joan also performs folk and personal tales of food, family, strong women on stages across the country, UK and Europe. She teaches classes on writing and presenting, and now offers a one woman show bringing Louisa May Alcott to today’s audiences. You can find her on Facebook contact her at [email protected]