The elderly man took his usual evening walk after tea.
He’d been doing it for years. In fact, so often that his way through the trees using the narrow well-trodden paths was hardly noticed anymore. Before she passed away, they had always done it together. It had been a ritual. He knew that his decision to carry on with it was in memory of her. As a couple, they’d been bonded since childhood. The illness had taken her slowly and they had often talked about whether there was an afterlife. If there was, he promised he’d find her. Now, like her, nature was allowing many of its trees to slowly shed its leaves and on this particular evening, he was walking over a carpet of fallen maple leaves. Being such large leaves, they tended to overlap when they hit the ground, covering and partly hiding the path.
He was suddenly aware of a large leaf drifting down so close by that he was able to easily put out a hand and catch it. It was a beautiful example of its kind, despite the fact that it was dying. He moved off the track to a fallen tree trunk and sat down with it. After a while he let it drop. It would lay there and rot, he thought.
It would break down and disintegrate slowly. It would become one with the soil and the compost, along with all the other leaves, would enrich the earth and allow other things to begin anew as the season changes.
He thought of her again and smiled.
After all, wasn’t rebirth just an ongoing cycle?