I forgot the tender stack of leaves in the car. We had collected them the day before in North Georgia, on a winding trail up and around rocks that eventually led to a tumbling river. Oak, maple, dogwood, sweetgum. The colors struck a rainbow of pigments that told tales of their time in the sun. They survived two brothers’ antics and the constant bend and snap of a mother noticing nature and keeping her brood safe. The stack delighted me as I added to it, showing it off to my partner and holding it up in the light.

But, I forgot the tender stack in the center console between the captain seats of our Sienna. I collected it again when I found our coffee bean bag empty the morning after we returned from our trip. The leaves had curled on themselves, the brighter ombre colors turned inward and the dull undersides showed a different kind of beauty. The stack snuggled in, hugging themselves with leaf arms and stems stretching out, in seeming futile hope of reaching the branch that once gave it life.

I love the crunchiness of this time of year. Where the ground once squished, it now crackles underneath my feet. Each leaf has its own delicate story of beginning and living and dying with the almost weightless grace. The science of leaves changing colors, from bud to broad to breaking free, is easily explained with pigments and sunlight– my daughter tells me, anyway. But the enduring truth of the whole process speaks of something less calculated.

When God began things– breathed or spoke or willed or wooshed the world into being– He immediately constrained things to time, ordering the days, weeks, years and seasons in a way that could tell an ordered story back to the creation seeking Him out. And the story these leaves tell (or, maybe one of the many stories), is one of life and death and community.

I’ve always wondered at the beauty of the death in the seasons. We gaze in awe at the colors as they change, travel long distances to stare at mountainsides and clamor up trails where the trees are tight together. We are shocked every year that the leaves have done it again, though we know exactly why and how. We pull the autumn season up around our ears like a blanket and sit to watch the firework display that cannot be replicated or outdone by human hands. This is the work of the Creator. So, why must this mastery disappear? Why must the leaves leave?

I look at the curled clump of leaves now brittle in my hands. I notice the dry cracks around my knuckles and remember winter will morph my body as well. We will collect leaves and string them up in our living room soon, hanging them so the tallest heads have to duck underneath. We will notice the way each leaf is different in color and pattern and the ways they dance when the boys wrestle the walls.

But, these brittle leaves in my dry, autumn hands are not stretched out like nature’s bunting above our heads in the living room. These leaves I stacked so carefully are now curled in snugly and I read my own story back from them– that when my life began by the thought or the song or the woosh of my Creator, my life was also starting to die. My fate as a daughter of Eve and Adam is that my current body is not my forever vessel.

We are, those of us with breath, leaving this place even as we are living in it.

And though my body’s clock began a countdown when it breathed first, I remember God did not think it good for Adam to be alone. When sin broke the lifeblood and beauty of their garden home, they needed each other. They curled in even as they were cast out and God knew. God provided community before the first sadness had ever snuck in with sin. God knew that the bodies he formed from dust would be brittle in a different way, breaking with the weight of a free will that chose to defy the living God in violent acts of self glory.

The story of these curling leaves is the story of my own heart– hurt by my own sin and the weight of a world filled with brokenness. As I reach out to live out my days in all their glorious pigments and seasons, I curl in with a body that cannot be alone. And this is the Lord’s good provision inside the fate of our leaving.