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5 min read travel

Letter of News: Proof of Leaf

A close-up photo of colourful maple leaves in various states of dryness. The topmost leaf is small, red, veined in gold, and freshly fallen.

Dear Friends,

I've been trying to send a newsletter about What I've Done This Summer for... The entirety of the summer. It's now past summer! Labour Day is in the rearview mirror! And because one of the things that happened during the summer was a lot of dry weather, the neighbours' maple has been dropping bright red leaves into our yard for a couple of weeks now, so that when I sit in the garden to write – a thing I've been doing, blessedly, miraculously, for about a month – it already smells of autumn.

This isn't even the long, rambling letter I've been haltingly composing off and on for months, constantly outpaced by the circumstances I'm trying to document. I've travelled so much this year. I've travelled so much that I've begun to look towards being home with the same tremulous, adventure-seeking excitement usually reserved for leaving it.

A small back of the napkin calculation: by the end of this year's 52 weeks, I think I'll have spent roughly 16 of them on the road. That's fully one third of the year away from home – where my office is still a half-assembled mess, and the living room's walls lack art, and the bookshelves – friends, the bookshelves are not organized. That's usually the first avoidance activity I indulge in after a move! We moved here a year ago!

And there are still so many things to do, and places to go. I won't be nestled home with no more travel on the horizon until... November 10? Something like that. This isn't a complaint, mind you – merely a series of sheepish, windswept excuses for being absent from my letter-writing.

But for the moment, I'm sitting at a long table under a gazebo in the enchanted garden I get to call mine for at least one more year, while a soft wind blows dry leaves and maple seeds around me in a fragrant susurrus. A red-eyed vireo and some goldfinches have been keeping me company, and I just looked up to see a monarch butterfly settle on a bare expanse of catalpa tree branch, where it's currently opening and closing its wings like a book inviting me to read it. Excuse me a moment while I attempt to take an insufficient and blurry photo of it.

[There was going to be a photo here but it really was too blurry and insufficient to share, and then I chased the butterfly around the garden like a reprehensible flutterazzi before it vanished into a neighbour's yard]

Anyway, that's all for now. On Monday I fly off to teach at Banff for two weeks, and hope to write from there. (If you're local, come out to this cool event!) Some postscripts with links follow; I hope you'll click them, and forever find ways to keep working for the liberation of all sentient beings.

Wishing you all strength and sustenance in the ongoing fight against fascism,

Amal

A selfie taken against a background of leafy green trees and a square trellis. I'm smiling close-mouthed while wearing roundish sunglasses, a dark blue sleeveless linen top, my long dark hair in a side braid, and a pale denim baseball cap from Macmillan Audio that reads "Good Listener" on the front. I'm also wearing dangly earrings with a brassy half-moon shape at the end inside of which is nestled a round flat wooden bead, as well as a Parrish Relics necklace that consists of a pair of brass branches enclosing a piece of William Morris foliate wallpaper.

Postscripts:

  • Once again due to shenanigans it's possible Perfect Books has come into possession of some double-signed copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War, as well as single-signed copies of The River Has Roots. Contact them if you're interested! They ship internationally for the additional price of shipping.
  • I loved reading this essay by Vajra Chandrasekera, and was especially struck by this passage:
The demon, in his story, attempts to persuade the man to give up one of his loved ones in exchange for the other and his own life, making the familiar utilitarian arguments for harm reduction. Incensed, the man says: demon, why do you assume you will win? And he leaps forward to fight, and perhaps to die. The story goes no further, and so we must fill it in ourselves, according to our own balance of pessimistic and optimistic humours.

I'm also just lifting this next passage wholesale to make the same recommendation; imagine me repeating it out loud in my own voice.

I strongly recommend you donate today to Hani Almadhoun’s Gaza Soup Kitchen or any of the fundraisers run by the Sameer Project, if you’re not comfortable donating to individual fundraisers. If you are, you can look at Molly Shah’s timeline on Bluesky or this spreadsheet by the Butterfly Effect project for a list of verified individual campaigns. If you can’t afford to donate, you can choose fundraisers to boost, and do it at every opportunity. There is such a thing as the least you can do, and too many people do not bother to find out what that is, much less exceed it.

Published by:

Amal El-Mohtar

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