Last night I was walking from campus back to my apartment. It had been raining all day, but at this point it was just a light drizzle misting from the sky. As it’s fall, there are leaves all over the ground in various shades of red and orange and gold and yellow, and they’re especially abundant about Northeastern’s campus, where the trees are numerous and the leaves are numerous-er. I had my music on, my hood down, and was very much enjoying the light rain on my face. I was walking through a residential part of campus and a kid with a backpack was walking toward me, but he did something peculiar. As he was walking, he stopped, took three steps backward, then bent and picked up one of the soaking-wet leaves on the ground. He looked at it, turning it over and over in his fingers with a small smile playing around his mouth, until he very gently creased it in the middle and put it, water droplets and all, into his pocket. In the three years I have been at college, I have never seen a person do something like this, and it makes me happy that I’m not the only one who finds leaves on the ground pretty or who wants to grab at pine needles on trees or who picks the single flower in a crowd of weeds. I have a deep and thorough appreciation for nature, and I’ve always been of the rather ignorant assumption that other humans, given our modern technological world and apparent apathy for the decline of the natural Earth, are sort of “meh” about nature. But this kid isn’t apathetic about nature, just as I’m not, and that is a fact for which I am glad.

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