Natalie RandallFollow

Date Collected

Winter 12-5-2017

Place item was collected

Logan, Utah in the informant's apartment

Informant

Emily Rice

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

The informant is my roommate of 2 years. She was born and raised in West Bountiful, Utah. She has only one brother, who is younger than her. She is 19 years old. Her family is very outdoorsy and very close knit. They enjoy doing things together and know everything about each other's lives. Emily enjoys reading and she often gets books as gifts for birthdays and such. The legend she shared with me comes from a book she was given as a child. This book is a children’s book full of fairytales that she read when she was 8 years old.

Context

She and I were supposed to be doing homework in our room, but we were mostly just chatting with each other. I remembered a story she had told me once when we were walking home from campus. I had stepped on a leaf and remarked how I loved the crunchy sound. We then got talking about fall and she told me a story about how the leaves feel when they fall off the trees. That happened about a month before I collected the folklore from her. When I asked her to tell me the story again, she told it to me as though I had never heard it before.

Text

There was a little Autumn leaf, and well, he was born in the spring clearly, first, you know. He comes out, he’s loving the world, enjoying the little sunshine, and growing bigger and bigger. And then in fall, he turns a pretty color, and um, then he realizes his friends start to fall off the tree and then he’s like ‘Oh no, it’s the end of my life!’, and he gets really depressed about it, but then he remembers that when he goes in the ground he’s going to make fertilizer for new little plants and it makes him happy. And so when he falls from the tree it’s not the end. The End.

Texture

Emily has a soft spot for stories and as such she often changes her voice when re-telling a story like this one. She sounds as though she is speaking to a child. Her tone is softer and her words become more cutesy. She simplifies words and smiles a lot when telling this story. Even though she had already told me the story, she told it again as if she was telling it to me for the first time.

Course

Introduction to Folklore

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2017

Theme

G4: Animal and Object Tales

EAD Number

1.0.2

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