This is Not a Leaf

This is not a leaf.

These are not leaves.

Nope.

If I had grown up Canadian, a leaf may have looked like this:

If I had grown up in the Caribbean, leaves may have looked more like this, and may have been called a fronds:

Coming from Chicago, fronds meant exotic always warm far away lands.  Coming from Chicago, a leaf could well have been an apple or an elm.  There was an elm in our yard that somehow survived when all the surrounding elms were done in by Dutch Elm disease in the 1960s and 1970s, and three apple trees-  a reminder that the land on which our house sat had once been something else.  A green orchard, turned into a grey suburb.

I think it was that it was the first leaf that appeared in the spring.   March has to be the dreariest month-  a monochrome world with none of the beauty of fresh snow lacing bare trees, nothing but mud and melting piles of black slush.  Sometime in every April-  the first tiny shards of impossible green stabbed through the grey and burned themselves into my brain.  The lilac.

Syringe vulgaris-  native to the Balkans, where they grow on rocky outcrops, and my front yard, where they separated our yard from our neighbor’s yard.  Say the word leaf, and my mind's leaf is always shaped like a lilac leaf. 

What is your leaf shaped like?  

What shade is your green?