The Two Leaves
I’m scared.
It’s pandemic time and I am lying on my bed in a tiny rare quiet moment and I am letting myself feel the feelings of now that I don’t want to feel
and I’m scared.
And I am trying, desperately, to think of something that will calm this fear, something to hold on to. Anything.
Have I ever known anyone who survived a pandemic? I run through the albums of my mind.
I have: my Great-Grandma Amelia, my mother’s grandmother, a voice on the other end of a telephone when I was little. The Florida great-aunts, my grandfather’s sisters, all steel-gray-haired and smiling. My grandfather, my father’s father, born in 1904, solid and stubborn and strong. My grandmother–
“You’re going to be one someday.”
I hear a voice — her voice — in my head saying those words and I burst into tears — of relief.
Something just cracked open and a thread rolled out in front of me — a thread that runs through this crisis and beyond it:
‘You’re going to be a grandmother someday.’
I’m crying harder and the tear-it-down parts of my brain start doing their thing — “you don’t know that” and “how could you prove it” and “you’re just imagining things” and then I realize:
It doesn’t matter.
I don’t have to prove it.
It doesn’t have to be true.
It doesn’t have to be real.
*It just has to work.*
I remember a story I read a long time ago, The Two Leaves — a young woman is sick, there’s an epidemic, and she tells her roommate that she’s going to die when the last of the leaves falls off the branch she can see from her window.
“There they go, there’s only ten left now . . . now nine . . . and when the last leaf has fallen, I’ll go too.”
And the leaves keep falling.
And falling.
But the very last leaves, the last two leaves, don’t fall — they stay. And they stay. And they stay.
And one day she wakes up and sees the two leaves still there. “I’ve been so silly. Of course I’m not going to die. Please bring me some broth, and maybe some warm milk with port?”
She lives.
Days later, when she’s well again, she wants to go and look at the two leaves — the leaves that would not fall, the leaves that told a different future than the one she was writing — and she discovered that the leaves weren’t leaves at all. They were a painting, a beautiful fool-the-eye masterpiece, painted by the elderly artist who lived downstairs.
The leaves weren’t real.
That didn’t matter.
*They worked.*
I’m lying here and I’m still crying and I’m thinking about leaves and I realize with a jolt that there’s a leaf not two feet away from me, on my night table — a leaf carved by my other grandfather, my mother’s father.
The grandfather who didn’t live through a pandemic, but who survived the Depression as the young son of a widowed mother, then served overseas in World War Two, then came home and worked hard for decades, laying tile and flooring.
He brought home leftover pieces and made things with them — a heart out of pink linoleum, a daisy of pieces of white and yellow, and from a swirled green:
A leaf.
He made art from the scraps of ordinary existence, in the rare tiny quiet moments.
Like me.
I am thinking about leaves and in the story, the original story, the elderly painter dies — he catches pneumonia from staying out in the cold and rain to paint the two leaves to save his young neighbor.
But I don’t want any more stories about sacrificing yourself entirely for others.
I want stories where we all survive.
*Find your leaf, then paint one.*
Make sure you’re okay first — find your leaf. Something, anything, to see a future past the unbearable now. Doesn’t matter what. You don’t know what will work, so try anything, try everything. Read something new. Reach out to someone you miss, or someone you want to know. Let yourself rest. Watch something silly. Make something up. Check in with your ancestors. Listen for whispers of a new future.
You don’t have to justify it or explain it or defend it.
Hell, you don’t even have to tell anybody.
It doesn’t have to be real.
It just has to work.
*Find your leaf, then paint one.*
Then paint one — it can be anything. You don’t know what might work for someone else so try anything, try everything. A painting on the boards covering your closed store, telling your neighbors you miss them and will be back soon. A kind word. A note in the mail out of the blue. A poster in your window that can be seen from the street that says “courage, dear friends.” An unexpected gift. A story.
It doesn’t have to be real.
It just has to work.
*Find your leaf, then paint one.*
I’ve got my leaf — a voice in my head telling me I’ll be a grandmother one day, and a promise-like token passed from my grandfather’s hands to mine.
Now I’ve got my paintbrush.
This story is a leaf I am painting on the wall just outside your window.
I dearly hope you see it.
I dearly hope it works.
