Nature Observation 3: Leaf

[November 14, 2018]

Today our class let out early so we could go outside and observe something in nature in close detail. It was quite cold so I was hoping to find something portable to bring back to the dance building with me for observation. As I walked along the sidewalks of campus, I felt somewhat disappointed by how brown and dead everything looked. It wasn’t that long ago that the grass was green and flowers were in bloom! After making a lap, I finally saw out of the corner of my eye a huge leaf that lay there in the grass, so much larger than the rest. It had a certain shine to its brown surface that I really loved. I found my piece of my nature and happily made my way back through the biting air to Erma Lowe Hall. When I got back in to the cozy lobby and sat down with my leaf I began trying to write its characteristics down in words:

From my wrist to the tips of my fingernails, the leaf is still longer than my hand, and about as wide. It has a thin but strong stem poking out on the bottom that has sort of a dusty texture when you rub your fingers along it. The leaf is not perfectly symmetrical but from the stem upwards, its edges proceed out away from each, round back in on themselves, and come together in a reverse V at the top. If I remember my high school biology class well enough, this leaf could be classified as “ovate” for its roughly oval shape and pointed end. Though I haven’t broken it yet, you can tell this leaf is perfectly crisp and would make a good crunch under your foot or in a leaf pile made for jumping. I bet I could snap a corner and break off a clean line but I won’t because I have to show my leaf off to all my dance friends!

The brown leaf seems to be kind of rolled over on itself in a variety of directions like waves frozen in time on the ocean. It seems that when the leaf fell from its tree it wasn’t laying flat or shriveled up the more it dried out. When you look closely at the top of leaf, you see symmetrical veins coming out from the center in a rounded V shapes. Up close you also see that the coloring is quite varied across the leaf with darker stains and lighter spots. The bottom of the leaf has a chipped triangular section that seems to be holding on by a thread. At the very top, the midrib is also tearing along the seam, but you can only tell when you angle the leaf a certain direction. Perhaps most notably, this leaf has three grayish white spots where the leaf seems to be rotting. These spots are irregular in shape and have a different texture than the rest of the leaf’s surface. The largest of the three spots has already become a hole wide enough to see through, with just the grayish white ring around its perimeter.

Just as I flipped the leaf over to begin taking note of its opposite side, two other girls walked in to the lobby and exclaimed “is that a leaf?!” I thought to myself, “yes what else would it be.” Then one of the girls picked it up and started describing how she thought the white hole looked like an eyeball, and the slit down the middle looked like a mouth, and the whole leaf looked like a fish on its side. Later, another dancer asked me if my assignment was to watch the leaf decompose because it was already so “rotten” and "ugly." And finally at the end of rehearsal that night, a third girl picked up my leaf and started to rip it apart because she didn’t realize I had brought it into the studio on purpose. I decided after each of these encounters it was time to return my leaf to nature…