Today Lexa handed me a leaf. On one side it was a warm faded gold, and on the other the color of old tea. The edge seems to have decomposed in the dry eastern Utah air, and left a sort of hatching. What makes this leaf beautiful is its sheer uniqueness: there never has been a leaf exactly like it given its unique life history, and there will never be one exactly like it again. When I hold the leaf to the sky it glows, and the most vivid colors emerge, contrasting with the now clearly visible veins. These veins reflect the surrounding landscape: from above I imagine the fall colors of the cottonwoods running like veins, following the watersheds that supply life to the desert.
I bring the leaf down, and look up at the trees around. It is not only in their individual beauty that they are stunning, but also in their collective identity. Before they fall, they sing and dazzle together in harmony, each tree creating its own unique sound to join the others humming on the canyon walls. Each tree is unique as well, with its own DNA that is specially adapted through millennia of its ancestors' evolution. Their adaptations fit the local area, which is why they are special as native species. However, their local area is changing around them. Climate change is bringing the ideal habitable zone for the cottonwoods further north, which means the trees that have been in the same spot, watching over the canyon for years, are in peril.
The imperiled trees in this canyon have seen so much. They have stood peacefully, shading all kinds of animals as they cruise by: about ninety five percent of wildlife in the area travels through the riparian corridor at some point in their life. They have watched native peoples traveling through the area replaced by white settlers, and afterwards the arrival of all kinds of new, vigorous species: tamarisk, russian olive, and the like. They watch generations of their leaves grow and then fall, decomposing into the surrounding landscape. some come to rest beneath their creator, to be broken down back into the soil from which they came, to be brought back into the service of the tree again. Some leaves end up further away, to be turned into a shrub that will one day be eaten by a passing deer, and its nutrients will end up walking back by the tree it fell from. Some leaves will be picked up by myself for further inspection.
I let the leaf slip through my hand and make its dance towards the ground, joining its brethren to create a complex mosaic, with every leaf at a slightly different stage of life. The desert fosters a slow type of decomposition that occurs slowly: the sun beats down on the leaves, and grains of sand from the breeze wash over them, scraping away bit by bit. The dry air ensures a lack of mold, so the leaves just sit and wait, while the life they may soon become a part of walks beside them. When the breeze that stirred the sand comes through some of the last remaining leaves from a nearby tree lose their grip. They blow off to the left, a cloud of the tree’s essence still shimmering and twisting as it dissipates, and leaves scatter towards the creek.