There is one red tree in the woods across the pond, and I almost don’t notice it.
I don’t know when it started to turn color. I see it for the first time tonight, just as the setting sun drops so low its light stretches only to the topmost branches of the trees, leaving the rest in shadow. It’s not even the whole tree, really: just one solitary branch, glowing like the heart of an ember in a sea of rippling, end-of-summer green.
I step outside to get a better look. The deck is cold against my bare feet, and the air no longer hangs heavy and soft and warm. It is light, its touch brisk, and the sharpness of winter hangs back somewhere not too far behind it.
This is normally the realization that sends me dancing off to start my Christmas music and light my pine-scented candles, but not this year. This year—this evening— I look out at that one burning limb, waving like a scarlet flag, and it makes my heart stutter to see it. Because all of a sudden it dawns on me that it is autumn, and not just in a look-at-the-calendar way, but in the same way that a soul feels the passage of time when it’s not too caught up in the body’s rush to check off yet another day. And where in the world has the year gone? It hardly seems possible to me that spring and summer are over, though when I look back I can count where the days themselves went. And I know full well why my heart is heavier than usual at the sight of the first fall tree.
What a heartache this year has been.
But what I also know is that the struggles we’ve encountered on a large scale this year are but echoes of the personal tragedies that occur on a smaller scale every single year. And I have no more an answer for those than I do for the agonies of the world at large, though logically those should be easier problems to solve. But they're not. And as I look out at that one small, scarlet limb, burning itself up against the darkening sky, it seems to me that in a way, this branch is a kind of an answer.
It is burning in solidarity with a busted-up world. Unwilling to wait for the rest of the forest—or even the rest of its own tree— to turn as part of the peak fall color that even the most cynical will stop to notice, it is breaking out the beauty early. Even if it means it will be bare sooner, it burns on, and like a lighted window in the darkness, my eyes are drawn to it.
This is what our world needs right now, friends. It doesn’t need bold declarations of defiance and certainty: those are hollow promises at best. It needs us to do the brave, little things, because what's true in individual tragedies is also true when the world at large is dark: the really important things masquerade as the unimportant things. We don’t have the answers to lost jobs or depression or cancer. We cannot cure viruses, mend fractured politics, or single-handedly restore struggling economies. But we can make a meal and drop it off at a neighbor’s house. We can send a note telling someone we love them. We can deliver fresh-cut sunflowers to a stranger and remind them that they aren’t alone in their struggles, whatever those may be.
We can be like that brave little branch that I know is still blazing out there in the night.
