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17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. James 1:17 NKJV
THE LEAVES HE SENT
It was an unlikely friendship to have begun that fall day.
She was a tall, elderly, gray-haired spinster and I was a very young eighteen-year-old girl working after high school graduation.
We met in the church school classroom, where we were to teach together for the next six years. No one ever really knew her age, it seemed. She transcended the years between us as she guided me into teaching the children and as she watched me grow in my faith along with “our” third graders.
Of all the joys we shared during those years of teaching, the greatest times were in the fall of the year when we’d gather leaves and decorate our classroom. The arrival of the autumn leaves was always followed by evenings of planning, over hot chocolate, the yearly church school’s Christmas party, and beautiful pageant.
Time Passed
Years passed.
Together we shared the joy of my wedding plans and how excited she was when my first baby daughter arrived!–
—–and then my second daughter
— and then —
— then, we had to move 1400 miles away.
Of all the people I hated to leave, Miss Getchell was high on the list. She would write, she promised, telling me not to worry if I didn’t have the time to write much back around young mother busyness ..and write she did.
Everything was different in our new home – a mobile home trailer. The climate was especially different from our northern one. Fall came and I glumly missed “Miss Getchell’s leaves.” Here there was no brilliant foliage.
The Letters
Every week, however, came one of Miss Getchell’s letters. They were long, hand-written letters – pages and pages telling me of all the news at church school.
I never felt I had left at all when I learned all the hometown news each week. And every fall, so my own children would know them, she enclosed an envelope full of fall leaves from the tree outside our old classroom window.
My third baby arrived and Miss Getchell was delighted, though her handwriting now was a little harder to read.
She was ill she wrote – her lungs, her heart.
Still, in the fall, her leaves arrived, and always her letters of love.
We learned in the summer, she had cancer – inoperable, some friends wrote.
I called her in the hospital, but she could barely speak.
I wrote her then and told her in my letter how much I had learned from her, how dearly we all loved her.
It never reached her in time.
I sat numbly in the living room, her last letter in my lap.
“If I live until fall,” she had written, “I’ll send the children our leaves.”
“She didn’t live ’til fall,” I sobbed to my husband, “and she never got my last letter.”
“She didn’t need that last letter. She’s always known we’ve loved her,” he said.
His words helped some. Eventually, the numbness went away.
Fall Again
Soon the summer went away too and it was autumn again.
Autumn in our area of Florida, as I said before, is a cooler version of summer.
The leaves were all green everywhere.
No “fall” leaves.
No ” Miss Getchell” leaves.
It was Thanksgiving Day and my husband was working. My two daughters, now 4 and 5 years old, were playing in their room waiting for Daddy’s arrival and our turkey dinner to begin. I sat in the living room watching my 18-month-old son asleep on the rug before me. He looked so sweet. I knelt down beside him, and in that position on my knees, I looked up out our little trailer windows.
A Riot of Color
Suddenly, in disbelief, I saw my neighbor’s tree. It was a small tree, I had never paid much attention to before. No, truthfully, had never even noticed – never even SEEN before –now in a riot of fall colors. —-red and orange and gold. There wasn’t one green leaf on the whole tree. And everywhere under that tree were fallen leaves of brilliance.
I called my daughters excitedly from their play.
“Go, gather leaves…fall leaves for our Thanksgiving table…leaves…the kind Miss Getchell used to send you.” The words caught in my throat…
From the window, I saw my daughters joyfully gathering the glorious foliage and I remembered her last letter.
“If I live until fall, I’ll send the children our leaves.”
Tears streamed down my face.
His Great Love
While she wasn’t here to send the leaves, God, our loving Father, had Himself sent me leaves of love.
On my knees, I had looked up and seen the tree.
Now I was again on my knees,
thanking God that this fall
and every fall
and evermore
He loves
and
– she lives.