The leaves on the inside of my office window are attached to a long-dead branch from our birch tree, which my daughter and her classmate turned into a work of art about 12 years ago with the aid of a flower pot, some dry soil, and some finely wrapped and coiled strands of copper.

The leaves on the outside are part of a living tree planted along the sidewalk beside the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee, where my office is located. The trees across the street, heavily shadowed during the day, still have green leaves. But the tree outside my window is exposed to sunlight most of the day, so not only has it already turned but it has also lost many of its leaves.

Maybe “correspondence” would be a more accurate word to use in this post’s title than “synchronicity.” I was struck by the similarities, the parallels even, between my little artwork of “preserved autumn” and the living tree of real, “currently unfolding autumn” on the other side of the glass, which will not be preserved other than this image in a photograph.

My birch tree’s old dead leaves, long detached from their original context, will live forever as a work of art (at least, as long as I’m alive or as long as my heirs may care to keep it around), while the dead leaves still attached to the living tree outside my window will be gone forever once they’re swept away by wind and lost to decay.

I guess I’m thinking about life, death, and immortality today because of the book we talked about last night at the MSOE book club, The Invention of Morel. That seems like a discussion worthy of its own post, however, so I’m going to save it for tomorrow. Plus I have a different picture to accompany that post, coincidentally (or would that be “synchronicitously?😀) another work of art that I took a photo of on my way in the front door of The Explorium Brewpub, where we met.

Yeah, I think a photo of dead leaves inside and outside my office window is enough of a blog post for one day, lol, especially if I’m to have any hope of posting more often than I have been lately. So until tomorrow, arrivederci!❤️