David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Shadow Searching

The best in this kind are but shadows.
Shakespeare

And coming events cast their shadows before.
Thomas Campbell

Refreshing the way I look at the world around me often involves shadow searching. Rather than just looking directly at the objects, people, and creatures around me, I concentrate on their shadows. Observing the darkened outlines is so different from my normal way of looking that when I resume concentrating on the things themselves I see nuances, details, and movement to which I was previously blind. My outlook is reset, as if I’ve gone from two dimensional vision to high-def.

Wherever there is light there are shadows. Occupying a three dimensional space behind an opaque object blocking a light source, shadows are the companion of illumination. They get a bad rap as a kind of negative space, an insubstantial outline of something tangible, a phantom existence. As metaphor, shadows have a mysterious connotation, ominous, malignant even. They are the dark side of reality, something to be feared.

Old Sugarhouse (poem)

Rain rotten, wind twisted,
the mossy swayback roof
at last crushed by snow,
the old sugarhouse lies victim
to the storms and strain
that grow a good sugarbush.

Sap once boiled golden
in this sauna of woodfire and vapor
where visitors shared stories
rising on steam like prayers,
knowing sugaring is done
in the sweetness of time.

Cycling season-to-season, sap
to syrup, buckets to tubing,
old maples to firewood,
there’s chatter under new roofs,
drudgery is joy, and sugarmakers
are ever aboil for a better year.

The Best Nuts Fall Like Manna

Hickory nuts are among the rarest foodstuffs, yet they grow all around us in southern New England. You can’t find them in the baking or produce department of a supermarket among the   almonds, walnuts, and pecans, or in the snack food aisle beside the cashews, Brazil nuts, and pistachios. Most people have hardly heard of them, or wonder if they are edible. Although you can bake with them, foraging food guru Euell Gibbons found few better for eating right out of the shell.

No truer taste of a tree can be had than in a hickory nut. Buttery, with a hint of caramel, the meats are at the intersection of commercial walnuts and pecans in flavor, but somehow more powerful, richer. They seem to suggest the strength and potency of the wood itself, dense with BTUs as firewood, strong and flexible enough for tool handles and baseball bats that take continual punishment.

Toward the end of September, just as the trees’ distinctive three terminal leaflets were yellowing, I spent a few hours in bright sunshine gathering hickory nuts. Next year I’ll get an earlier start as the squirrels had been to the groves of shaggy barked trunks well before me and taken the best for themselves. Even so, my wife Mary and my naturalist friend Jay took the side of the bushy-tailed creatures and warned me to leave sufficient numbers behind.

Doppleganger: A Memoir of Mirrored Selves

Homebound Publications | 2020 | 80 pages | ISBN 978-1-947003-74-3

If you've ever been mistaken for someone else or wondered if you might be, you should read this book. 

Imagine being haunted by doubles. Picture yourself repeatedly mistaken for others, both celebrities and unknowns. A double infiltrates your family life altering close relationships. Another brings your reputation and career into question. Shadowed or second selves have long blossomed in legend and stories, but in David K. Leff’s world they leap to life, intruding in unexpected ways. If you’ve never been scarred by a doppelganger, but especially if you have, you will want to join Leff as he struggles to maintain his equanimity in a realm of mirrored selves.

What People are Saying About this Book

“Both in his re-creations of familial and public trials with confusions of identity with other ‘doubles,’ our David Leff is able to meet and be open-hearted and open-minded with his two significant doubles. And here hangs the tale: for this reader, having a double may well be the trickster universe’s way of suggesting that we are not as singular as we think, that we come to know and appreciate who we are by way of others, whether we look like them or not.”

--Margaret Gibson, Poet Laureate of Connecticut

“In a world of billions intent on submerging our identities into the whole, David K. Leff makes an eloquent plea for individuality.”

–Eric D. Lehman, author of Great Pan is Dead

"His scholarship in wresting from his own struggle a sculpture of the shared human frailty of self doubt is an accomplishment of clarity and intellect.  His endeavor speaks for itself."

Gregg Grinspan, MD

Available Wherever Books are Sold, Including Homebound Publications:https://homeboundpublications.com/product/doppelganger-by-david-k-leff/