Pasting a leaf on my first page

Yesterday was one of the few days I've had in Manhattan this semester. It was a pleasure just to walk over to Union Square to Whole Foods to find something for dinner. I hadn't expected that the Greenmarket would be up and running on Friday afternoon, but the Square was full of booths. It's always a visual feast, but it seems richest in the fall: squash and tomatoes and greens. One booth had tubs full of maple branches, the leaves gone glorious. I thought, well, I'm not going to be in the apartment all that much. And, is there something odd about going out for food and buying leaves, having the luxury to buy leaves?

This is my first post on this blog, so it feels as if I've just bought a new notebook. Somehow to replace the great blank of potentiality with any one thing seems too small a gesture -- whatever I write here couldn't be as nice as the big field of silence I'm stepping into. But who wants a world full of blank notebooks? So I'm putting on the page those leaves -- which I came back for, after buying some heirloom tomatoes and then going to Whole Foods and getting some necessary stuff. There was something lavish about carrying one of those reusable grocery sacks down 17th Street with a big spray of leaves coming out the top, a blaze of ardor. For seven dollars.