Four meanings of "Leaves" - Updike's story

A few words on the beauty and sadness of John Updike's very short story Leaves in his early 60s collection The Music Room - this one, like several of the earlier ones in this collection, pushing the edges of story-writing as close to memoir and essay as possible, an experiment in form and genre for Updike that would bear fruit in his much later autobiographical  essays. This one an early examination of the theme of divorce that threads through so much of his fiction, with so many variants but all the same species: the husband remorseful and wistful still apparently in love with the wife who is leaving him, or at least with his now ex-wife in certain moments, gestures, or bursts of sensation - as in this story, which is just a few pp of a man now aline, with none of the sense of freedom or release that he had perhaps anticipated, but thinking about his wife's departure and drawing an elusive analogy to his condition and the forces of nature he observes on this autumn day - the changing colors of the leaves ,t heir various shapes and markings, the fruit some of the trees and bushes bear, and his sense of the cycle of death and rebirth in nature, making him sorrowful (as he feels autumnal, his life behind him) and wistfully hopeful as well, thinking of a rebirth of his life, after some difficult hibernal passage. Most remarkable in this story is the subtle play on the many interlaced meanings of leaves - the leaves he is observing of course, but also the leaves of a book, that he is writing, his true manner of rebirth and resurrection, and also the leave as a departure - she "leaves" him - and perhaps, in the background, a leave as a permission, specifically permission that grants freedom, as in by your leave or out on leave. Hard to say whether this is a story or a personal essay, but we're so close on the border here that the line of distinction between the forms vanishes, or leaves.