Maple Keys

The Professor is a funny mix of experience and lack thereof. He’s lived and studied abroad, he’s got an advanced degree in mathematics, he’s well into writing a six volume science fiction series, and he didn’t know that those whirly-gig seeds that come from maple trees, sycamores, ash and the like are called “keys”. He’s delighted by them, though.

Saturday evening, when we got back to the apartment after our day out, we saw that there’d been a windy storm in our area. The keys from the maple trees in front of our apartment building had descended by the thousands all over the parking lot, the cars, the lawn, and our third floor balcony.

It was a mild evening, and so after I went out on the balcony to water my plants I sat down at the table there and started to idly drop the stranded keys off the balcony to the ground. The Professor came out to see what I was up to, and became rapidly caught up on the game. He was somewhat methodical about his approach, analyzing each key first, looking for the slightly odd and mishapen ones to see how they’d fly compared to the perfect ones. For all that, he rapidly dropped the scientific approach for “gee whiz” delight when the wind would catch one of the keys and lift it high above the roof of our apartment building. We continued to play with the keys until we’d cleaned all of them off the balcony.

The next evening, he walked next door to the grocery store for a couple of items. When he returned, he had with him not only the spot shopping, but a plastic bag full of maple keys he’d gathered from the parking lot so we’d have more to throw off the balcony. How could anyone not love this man?