William Herbert "Skip" Boyer, 32°
15817 N. 6th Place, Phoenix, Arizona 85022-3060
Skip.Boyer@bestwestern.com

The golden leaves of fall recall to the author the "leaves"
of childhood and Masonic memories.

Fall is a golden time, both in the annual cycle of seasons and in the broader cycle of our lives. I grew up in Nebraska in those Eisenhower-bright days before we discovered that just about everything we enjoyed was somehow environmentally wicked.

The family home was nearly a century old when I arrived at a point where I began to notice such things as leaves and the changing of the seasons. Large oak, elm, and maple trees surrounded the house, providing shade in the heat of summer, places to climb in the spring, haunting silhouettes in mid-winter, and, best of all, a carpet of bright, technicolor leaves each fall.

Fall in the Missouri River Valley was something very special. Fall and that brief period we called Indian Summer made the rest of the year worth living. Days were warm, nights were crisp. The trees traded green for a full palette of almost neon colors, and the countryside seemed afire with golds, yellows, reds, oranges, and more.

Of course, the leaves fell, leaving the ground covered in a crazy quilt of color several inches thick. My father pointed to the rakes and his two sons headed for the front yard to accumulate large piles of leaves. Some of these piles were for jumping into-at which point they had to be reassembled. Eventually, they were all for burning.

The result was not just smoke. It was incense that I can still detect around the edges of memory. It hung in the air, a smoke-rich haze, for days. Kicking our way to school (uphill, both ways, with 12 feet of snow in the appropriate season), the leaves crackled and crunched under our small shoes. The scent of burning leaves was a sure guarantee that Halloween was on us. Life was rich then.

At school, we learned all about leaves. We even collected them and made scrapbooks out of them. I know this because one turned up recently when going through the old house. We did this nearly every year throughout grade school. It was much like the film we saw every year about the Monarch butterfly, complete with some really controversial footage about reproduction. Anyway, we learned that leaves are basically food-making machines. By photosynthesis, they turned water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into glucose. The leaves used a green pigment, chlorophyll, to aid in the process. We also learned to spell all those words.
Then fall came, and when the school day was over, we'd walk home in the gathering dusk of late afternoon, the leaves crunching below, the smoky haze of burning leaves so rich in the air you could almost reach out and touch it. And we didn't care about learning to spell photosynthesis or chlorophyll. The leaves were simply part of the magic of fall, and when you're five or six years old, that was enough. I know, in our enlightened age, it's a wicked thought, but I'm really tempted to find a pile of leaves someplace and set a match to it, just to smell the aroma that surrounded the hilltop of my childhood one more time as I embrace the fall of my life!

My leaf collection extends far beyond the simple scrapbooks of those long- distant grade-school days. At this time in my life, as the sun is well past the meridian, I find myself looking wistfully at the mental scrapbooks of my life and the "leaves" on each page. Some are places I've been, others are friends I've known and folks I've worked with.

There's an entire section devoted to the "leaves" I've collected during my Masonic travels. They are, I believe, the highlights of my collection-bright, colorful, interesting, and varied. I feel sorry for those whose lifetime collection is colorless and small. They've missed something worth having, and the fall of their lives is less golden.

For me, the fall of life really is a golden time, a Nebraska Indian Summer, full of the bright leaves of memory crunching happily under my feet and that distinctive windblown incense that marks both the ending and the beginning of things.

William H. "Skip" Boyer has been writing since he was three. His mother objected to crayon on the walls, however, and set his career back several years. A member of the Scottish Rite Bodies of the Valley of Phoenix, Arizona, he is a Past Master of Paradise Valley Silver Trowel Lodge No. 29. A native of Nebraska, he is Director of Executive Communications for the Best Western International hotel chain and serves as the company's Executive Producer and Senior Writer. He is the fifth generation of Master Masons in his family. His e-mail is: Skip.Boyer@bestwestern.com