Autumn: The Flying Tree

This is the third post of a 4-part series called “The Happenings on Highway 5.”

Our family only ever had one car, and a beater at that. Dad needed it to get to work, which left Mom and us kids with no transportation but our feet. To keep us busy and to burn up some of our energy, Mom took us on long walks, over hill and dale and into the woods.

In the spring, we sought wildflowers with names as colorful as some of their petals—Dogtooth violets, Johnny Jump-ups, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and Dutchman’s Breeches. We would surprise neighbors with bouquets on May Day.

In summer, when the soybean field was on rotation and planted with feed corn, we pilfered a few young ears and gorged ourselves at lunch. The tall, rustling stalks provided the perfect place for a game of hide-and-seek or freeze tag.

Autumn meant back-to-school and the joy of our maple trees shedding leaves and helicoptering seeds. Once, after we grew weary of raking and jumping into our crackly mound, Mom (having spotted a particularly brilliantly hued tree on the far side of the field) set our course for a hike.

The breeze ruffled our hair and carried that unmistakable, loamy smell of fall. The sun made us squint as we neared our destination, intrigued by its leaves rippling and vacillating in color from orange to dark chocolate. It was as if the tree was a giant lung puffing up and collapsing back. We took a few tentative steps closer, just as the canopy erupted into a velvety cloud of color. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Monarch butterflies shadowed us as they winged overhead in absolute silence. Mouths open, hearts thumping, attempting to comprehend what we had just witnessed, we watched until there was not a Monarch in sight.

The Butterfly Effect, part of something ominously called Chaos Theory, suggests that a small action, such as the flapping wings of a butterfly, can have a huge impact elsewhere in the world, for example, it can cause a tsunami. What affect did this startled Monarch migration have on some exotic locale that a girl from Indiana couldn’t begin to imagine? Did it change the course of a river in South America? Cause the eruption of an ancient volcano in the Indian Ocean? Or maybe, just maybe, it changed the way three kids and a mother would irrevocably be in awe of nature.