Todd R. Nelson lives in Penobscot. His essay collections, “Cold Spell” and “The Land Between the Rivers,” are published by Down East Books.

It is the last days of October 1979 and the oak trees have shed their leaves. Acorns have been pelting my car in the driveway for weeks — a startling barrage. The squirrels and mice must be happy indeed with the surfeit of crushed nuts on the tarmac for gleaning.

As I walk the yard, kicking the leaves, an annual mnemonic, a sonic line to follow, reawakens and leaves become old words and lines, thoughts and places.

As the leaves rustle, it is October, in Cambridge, at the start of my teaching career, and I listen to Donald Hall on the radio reading from his new collection of poems called “Kicking the Leaves,” named after the title poem.

His voice is a sonorous baritone as he walks us through the seven sections of the poem, the sound of leaves becoming the story of leaves in his life’s seasons. He has just moved from his professorship in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to live at his grandparents’ farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, and take up life as a full-time writer.

And only a year before, I too was kicking the leaves on the Maine college campus where I was a senior finishing my B.A. in English and writing about T.S. Eliot, destined for teaching. Hall’s poem begins:

Kicking the leaves, October, as we walk home together
from the game, in Ann Arbor,
on a day the color of soot, rain in the air…

That’s my walk. I too am that speaker. I can inhabit those lines. The sound, the tree species, the smells of leaves augur the reflective life to come, the chain of memories associated with October, autumn and, in particular, leaves.

The poem returns me to the suburban leaf-raking of my youth, when a staggering mountain of oak leaves in the front yard would cushion our vaults and daredevil bicycle crashes. Hall called it being “buoyant in the ocean of leaves.”

Oh, this delicious falling into the arms of leaves,
Into the soft laps of leaves!

And then it would be time to burn them and breathe acrid smoke as they turned to ash.

Nowadays, I mulch them and return them, and gather acorns for my granddaughter Freya to sprout in a special vase. I want her to have her own oak tree descended from mine.

I have found that certain poems cohere around particular moments, people and places in my life. For years, Hall’s poem was a staple for my English classes. It taught me how to better read poems; taught my students how poems mean (“Not another class on ‘deep inner meanings,’ Mr. Nelson!”); and how to stash the kernels of memory for later.

No, we need not torture a confession out of the poem or hammer away on metaphor and simile— just inhabit it for a while; let it talk to us, as us, if possible. You, too, have leaves in your memory bank. Kick them. Listen. Find their coherence.

The poem came to mind today when the leaves swirled at my feet. It always does. It’s a poem that works as memory works. A sound, a whiff, a glimpse of an old friend starts a frisson of recognition, a reunion.

Freya has a special climbing tree. Her visits begin with a leap into its convenient, lower branches for a test of her tolerance of new heights. Have the oak limbs grown? Freya’s limbs have. Each year she goes higher; or builds a new shelter of sticks — think Eeyore’s house — around the base.

It is her “decoration tree” because it contains Christmas tree ornaments raided from the basement boxes: the little felted acorns from a craft fair, crystals, sea stars and shells from the collecting beach.

How long will they last? October gives way to winter; snow coats the branches; the winds that are raking the leaves down today will tug at the cherished ornaments; and ice thwarts climbing … until spring. The tree is, perhaps, the same age as Freya’s mother.

Our deciduous friends the oaks shade us in the summer and guide the strong, warm rays of the lowered winter sun through the front windows where the dogs and cat luxuriate on a toasty rug. We all play a part in the story of leaves.