Fall in summer

Cherry tree, August 4, 2018

"The Great Gatsby" is a story set over the course of the summer of 1922. All of the action takes place between Nick Carraway's arrival in New York at the beginning of June and the funeral at the beginning of September, with the lethal events that punctuate the story happening at the end of August. Friendships form, long-lost loves are found, new relationships are born, there's treachery and crime and parties and fast cars and death, death, death, all in the course of three months. (And what did you do this summer?)

But for me, the most unrealistic aspect of the story is that Gatsby's groundskeeper wants to close up the pool at the end of August before it gets clogged with leaves. I mean, leaves don't start falling in the Northeast until well into late September, right?

My cherry trees are...weird. I planted them during a rainstorm in the spring of 2002. They were both supposed to be dwarf specimens, reaching no more than seven feet in height. In reality, one tops out at something like twelve feet, while the other is well over twenty feet tall. (I may have planted them too deep, burying the part where the rootstock was grafted to the body, causing the non-dwarf fruiting trunk to take root rather than the dwarf rootstock.) They didn't bear more than a handful of cherries in their first thirteen years or so. Then one year a few years back, after a particularly cold and brutal winter, they exploded with fruit. Last year was almost as abundant a fruiting season, although the birds enjoyed most of the harvest, not me. This year showed some promise at blossom time, but again only a few fruits ripened, almost all of which were promptly eaten by birds. (I wonder if fluctuations in the amount of fruit are more closely related to fluctuations in bird populations than to anything else.)

As far back as I can recall, my cherry trees have had their leaves turn yellow and drop off in early August. The first few times this happened I assumed they were falling victim to some sort of disease. But over the years I have come to accept this as just a normal part of their life-cycle. I just rake them, shred them, and then use them as mulch, as a quick carbon additive in the compost pile, or leave them in the bag for a few years to become leaf mold.

So maybe Gatsby's trees dropping their leaves at the end of August wasn't that unrealistic, or even unusual. Heck, maybe Gatsby had a few cherry trees on the grounds of his estate.