Round leaves of gold resurface

I posted this image back in August 2024, in "Round leaves and chip monks":

It's the sign for a restaurant that closed long ago and was called Round Leaves, with a logo depicting golden leaves that aren't particularly round. I was interested in it at the time because of various syncs about "leaves of gold" being connected with gold plates, as well as a few instances of round gold plates.

Less than two months later, in October 2024, as recorded in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace," I had a dream with the name Wallace in it and followed up by taking down the collected works of Wallace Stevens and opening to a random page, where I found these lines from his poem "World Without Peculiarity":

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

With the spices of red summer.

Just three days ago, on March 7, I found that my wife had put some sort of new air freshener thing in the kitchen, the lid of which looks like this:

Like the Round Leaves logo, it's a pinnate compound leaf, gold in color, and the circular lid out of which it is cut adds the "round" element. It thus reminded me of that old Round Leaves sync, so I snapped the above photo.

The next day, my wife asked me to buy lunch for her at a particular vegetarian restaurant that I hadn't been to in many months. While there, I noticed that one of the walls was decorated with a golden pinnate compound leaf. There was nothing "round" about it, but the fact that it was in a restaurant was a link to the original Round Leaves. I didn't get a photo of my own, but I found this one online:

That's a pinnate compound leaf on the left. On the right are two simple leaves, one of them lobed.

Today I started reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams, the author who came up in "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest"; I wanted to see what she's like as a writer before shelling out for Glorians, the specific title which came up in the syncs, which was just published a week ago and isn't on Internet Archive or Anna's yet. I read this:

I found peace in an aspen grove shared with my grandmother. In this place of rich black soil sheltered by the shimmering round leaves of white-barked trees, my voice set down roots.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

There's that exact phrase "round leaves" again -- an unusual one, since almost all leaves are pointed -- and they're "shimmering" as well. That verb comes from Old English scimerian "to glitter, shimmer, glisten, shine" -- like gold, maybe? The journal entry she is referring to was written in early August, when the aspen leaves would have been green. It's worth noting, though, that this is the first image on the Wikipedia page for "Aspen":

Aspen leaves, though also pointed, are relatively round. In Old English, the tree was called æspe, which Etymonline is unable to trace back to any word meaning anything other than "aspen." I noted the similarity to asp, though, and looked it up. It's "from Greek aspis 'an asp, Egyptian viper,' literally 'a round shield;' the serpent so called probably in reference to its neck hood." (This "asp" was most likely the Egyptian cobra; all cobras are called "glasses snakes" in Chinese, after the spectacled cobra of India, so there may be a spectacles link there, too.)

The aspis shield was made of wood but was often plated with metal and given a "golden" appearance:

I included the second paragraph in the quote above from When Women Were Birds because of its repeated reference to pages. I believe the first "leaves of gold" sync post was "Leaves of gold unnumbered" (January 2024), which begins with my attempts to find out "how many leaves or 'pages' there were in the metallic codex from which the Book of Mormon was purportedly translated." In Chinese, too, "leaf" and "page" are homophones.