THE AIR BROUGHT AUGURY ON THE AFTERNOON PRECEDING the night of the full moon, the eve of the vernal equinox, the spring harvest festival of Isis.

The winds were strong and the sky was overcast, but the weather was otherwise balmy and pleasing; and that morning I had opened a few windows slightly to let in the air of the day. The afternoon light through the gray cloud cover was beginning to diminish when I saw it resting on the sill beneath one of the narrowly open windows. A dried pallid tawny-brown oak leaf.

Living six flights up, with not a tree in sight, I could not recall a leaf entering my home, not even in the late autumn gusts. And the branches of what trees there were in the neighborhood had seemed to be starkly bare since the harshest days of this harsh winter. And the windows I had opened this day were ajar hardly a hand’s-breadth. But there it was, resting and still, awaiting me. The last leaf of winter, on the last full day of winter, on this afternoon preceding the night of the last full moon of winter, this eve of the spring equinox.

The full moon now rising was a rare one, a big and full perigee moon, raising tides as it drew closer to the earth than it had been in eighteen years. This powerful perigean effect on tides and other natural forces had not been so strong in all the years since that long-ago night. Melissa then was in her infancy. Perhaps she had howled at the light of that moon as she lay in her bassinet.

I knew it was an oak leaf. I found its likeness in my little Golden Nature Guide to trees. The oak was sacred to Zeus, god of gods. I seemed to remember that, according to one cosmogony, Zeus and Isis were the true parents of Dionysus. I looked through some books to find confirmation of this, and found that this belief was based on a fragment of Ariston. While looking through the books I searched, I discovered that the grandest of the festivals of Dionysus, the great Dionysia, was held in Athens in late March, at this same time of the Egyptian spring harvest festival of Isis.

In a fleeting reverie of whimsical imagination I envisioned the oak leaf wafting over ocean waves for thousands of years, from ancient sacred grove to the here and now of my windowsill, passing through the veil of time but showing its antiquity through that strange dry pallid tawny-brown that made it appear as delicate as it was enduring.

This was mere dreamy fancy, of course. But the presence of the leaf was not. I placed it carefully on my desk and I looked at it awhile. It was just a fucking dead leaf. But the convergence of all that surrounded it—moon, equinox, gods and goddesses, hallowed tree and hallowed turn of hallowed days—evoked a sense of magnitude, like a precession of some vast unexplored astronomy, of which this leaf was a silent betokening.

As with the return of my youth, I did not understand what was happening. Less so, in fact, because I was at least sure, or believed it to be sure, that my rejuvenation was being nurtured by my physical and spiritual immersion in, and merging with, the vital youth embodied in the vitally youthful flesh of another. I was, so to speak, being born again in the flesh. And in the blood; for I knew, or believed I knew, that this most intimate of acts was at the heart of it all, the most powerful and the highest aspect of our merging and the sustenance I received from that merging. It seemed like magic, but maybe it was nothing more than simple, science-based physiological cause and effect. The better part of medical knowledge—the better part of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise—lay unknown in plain sight, waiting to be known. Postulate precedes theorem, the empiricism of natural law precedes the formulae of its laboratory explication.

But this, the appearance on this day of what I felt to my bones to be a sign of the supernal, this leaf of augury, was to me a greater mystery. A mystery to whose meaning I had not a clue. Yet I somehow knew that, whatever it was, whatever it meant, it was good. Very, very good.

A new season of my life was upon me. And it would be like no other season of any life that had ever been lived. That’s what that leaf said. And that’s what I knew.