Air

Time to leave the tree house, my accommodation since Saturday. It being a tree house I am surrounded by trees, which means the car roof is covered in fallen leaves.

This leaf has now done its job for the year. It has lost the green chlorophyll, its way of using the energy of the Sun to make essential sugars to feed the tree. And as part of that process it has taken carbon dioxide from the air and produced oxygen, essential for life on earth. So a leaf is really a little chemical factory, or part of a larger chemical factory, and a beautiful one. And in the process it creates the air that we breathe. Something we take for granted, or don’t even think about at all, is a miracle of evolution.