I remember most being scared of the long fall. Very short to tall is within which, part of which I nestled amongst the branches and the lanceolate leaves, me and my other little gumnuts. I felt the bigger, older ones fall before me when the strength of the wrestling wind released them from their tired tether. One by one, I felt the weight of their fruit tug my branch down, each loss ending with a remembering rebound. All the while they dropped, dropped, dropped, I grew.

Before we were all leaving like this, we were busy with transformation. I emerged from a spindly branch, way up in the sky where the warmness and the coldness finds me first. I rolled inside myself, until I eagerly pushed hundreds of fine stems out from my encapsulating operculum, each little stem dusted with a sweet gift for relation. My decorations wait to be carried away, held up with a strong stalk that only once ready, gives way to the wind and so swoops to the soil.

And then, I remember feeling ready for the fall. For so long my weight was justified by growing strength. I was all tired, the weight of my growth began to strain on the branch, to pull with the heft of readiness that wanted release. I remember the day of the Great Big Wind which lifted me from my last link. The pushing began, slowly at first but soon rushing our branches in twists with the air. Each gust ended with a crack, and there I remember the falling of the big branches, the big break of the branch that ended with a pound on the roof above the roots, thatched with thousands of leaves and ribbons of bark and little woody gumnuts. And between the big breaks, I made my fall.

Those pounding, cracking, great big falls during the wind and the water were cushioned by the thousands of times throughout hundreds of years of falls which were not so scary. I reminisce about some of those, when the falling was with some of my glossy, thin, and long ornaments that would catch the spinning of the wind and dance, dance, dance to the ground. In time I am dancing. In the wind and the cold, I drop from alternated arrangements, twirling and diving and spinning in confusions of currents, these times because these times the air isn’t so heavy and harsh to plunge into.

There’s also the peeling, which isn’t really a fall at all but instead a stretch where I lean back away from myself, letting go of slabs and flakes and strings. The slow, refreshing losses liberate the new, which has grown and pushed the old into cracks and finally out.

And the falling of the water, my favorite fall. In the times where the warm, leaf-lighting emergence can’t give as strongly, sometimes instead there is the falling of water onto my crown, onto my great tall crown that wants to reach up, up, up into the sky as far and high as I could so that I could catch that dancing warm thing and share it with the ground. Sometimes the water dances too, it dances and it rests on my leaves and the crooks of my branches and beneath my bark, where it gathers and falls.