My son, Pat, had a serious mental illness but that didn't stop him from being a caring friend. Always short on money, he found creative ways to be a thoughtful gift giver. One fall he sent a box of New England leaves to a friend living on the West Coast who was homesick for seasonal color. Friend and poet, Gary Thompson dedicated the following poem to Pat. It appeared in Gary's book, On John Muir's Trail, Bear Star Press 1999. I found the poem among Pat's few possessions after he died. Thank you, Gary.
FROM CALIFORNIA
Your package of east coast
autumn leaves arrived
just as my life
needed connection to the seasonal
reds of my earliest falls
in Michigan.
I confess, young migratory friend,
the western dogwood beside my porch
is a stunning welcome
flame,
but I miss the maples more
each November spent
here where mostly oafish yellow big leaf
and vine imitations
drop their uninspired leaves.
I like to say maple,
my grandpa's eastern kind: mountain, silver,
red, and best of all -- the sugar
he coddled as a seedling
and loved until the budless spring
he died. Later, in forbidden Snow
Woods, I gathered red leaves
in my lunch box, afterlives
I spirited home
in the childhood dusk.
Your airmailed leaves spill
from a basket on my desk; my thoughts
blow east. I'll send
along a single heart-
shaped California
redbud leaf I've kept around
to ignite a day,
a fragile western find I found
might make me cry.
For Patrick Ranahan