In The Company of Trees

My little sisters and me at the foot of the Big Maple in 1952

Steven wrote a piece recently about talking to a small bush. Me, I talk to trees. I have always found it very satisfying to be in their company. Their solidity suggests strength, their rooted-ness implies stability, their forms define beauty. They are living breathing entities with whom I have shared a communion for as long as I can remember.

I first fell in love, as a small child, with the locusts and the huge maple that grew in our front yard. In May the two locust trees, one on either side of the porch, dropped their sweet, spring-scented catkins. The sticky yellow cases that bore them split and fell, littering the lawn. The maple was an enormous old tree that had a protuberance near its base that we children used as a seat. A sturdy limb reaching out across the lawn held our rope swing and under the board seat was a dusty circle made by our pushing feet where the grass would not grow. In the spring, the tree would drip sweet, sticky sap. In the fall it was crowned with orangey-yellow leaves and in the winter its bare branches wove intricate patterns against a frozen sky.

In later years, I made friends with all the trees in my neighborhood, with the giant maples, the sighing pines, the eerie black locusts that lifted their twisted limbs to the sky. I came to know the elm that leaned over the board railing at the brook, and the sycamore that dipped its toes into the river where it curved around a broad meadow. I sheltered from the rain under the hemlock boughs in the back yard, planted flowers in the rock garden under the big pine outside the kitchen window, leaned against the birch tree at the edge of the lawn to watch the sun fade in the western sky.

Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve made friends with the trees around me. I can wrap my arms around them and feel their strength and immutable-ness when I am sorely in need of a hug, rest my tired back against a sturdy trunk, send wind messages to my distant children via the leaves and whispering boughs, and understand magnificence from their ability to endure.

Taking Nothing For Granted

Some people take comfort
in the thought of an angel’s wing
flashing between themselves and eternity
or a sparrow savior, One who remembers
the least of us. My refuge is in
the company of trees,
in the upended bowl
of an autumn sky glimpsed
between the fingertips of cedars,
the sweep of cirrus cloud like remnants of cream
in a blue bowl,
the smell of sweet earth aroused by
the afternoon sun, the glad song of the
nuthatch, the pure, stunning thought of
an aster.

One November Morning

The early November air is mild and sunny. There is something about Indian Summer weather that feels like a reprieve, a reverent moment handed out before everything goes all cold and white. What's left of the bright leaves spiral down in a soft wind that, in the shade, has a bite to it though the sunshine where I sit is pure, warm gold. The blueberry bush at the corner of the house has gone all crimson. Amid the pines in the back, maple leaves blaze like yellow flames.


It has been a long, sweet fall, broken only by a rainy spell in October.

I puttered in the garden a short time this morning, pulling dead squash vines from the fence and yanking up withered pepper plants and eggplant stalks by the roots. When the wind stops blowing, I will rake the leaves and bring them by the wheelbarrow full to mulch the garden beds. In the flower garden, the rosebush by the door is still blooming.


The roadsides, however, are bereft of flowers. Only the skeletons of Queen Anne’s Lace remain. When the snow comes, the small brown seed cups will collect the flakes and offer them up like gifts.

Too soon the warm sun drops behind the western mountains and dusk falls, leaving only the cool breeze and the drifting leaves behind.

Please

Let me keep today, scented
with hemlock and pine, full of the jay's
strident call and the clattering
drop of acorns. In the cold months
to come, I will remember the ghostly
Indian Pipes gathered at the rock's feet
and the way the river water ran green.

Eggs-actly (a re-run)

My neighbor sells eggs. Often I go over and fetch a dozen out of the fridge on the back porch and leave my money in the bucket. Other times I wander into the henhouse with an empty carton and fill it with eggs lifted straight from the nests. Each small, warm oval rests lightly in my hand, a marvel of packaging and design. The hens cluck and fuss about my feet, the sun slants in the windows, filtering through the raised dust like rays from heaven, and the little enclosed world of egg production seems a place of warmth and rightness.

Tonight while I was contemplating what to make for dinner there was a knock on my door and there stood my neighbor with a carton in her hand. She set it on the counter and lifted the lid. In each of the twelve rounded cavities rested an odd-looking egg.

“I can’t market these,” she said, running her fingertips lightly over the shells and picking up one of the eggs from its resting place. It was bulbous at one end, as though the hen had given an extra hard push at laying time and then got up too soon. I had to chuckle. Each egg in the carton was just slightly askew, as though the idea of “egg” had been vaguely misinterpreted. One had extra chunks of calcium attached in an irregular pattern like some kindergarten child had made it with too much glue and enthusiasm. Another had an elongated end, a third had striations around its middle like a fancy, tooled chair leg. Two of the eggs were colored a pale bluish green and another two were so small they lolled in their hollows with room to spare.

“You see?” said my neighbor as I peered into the box. “None of these are ‘perfect’ so I can’t sell them in the store. Most people like their eggs to be….well, egg-shaped and these…” She looked at me and grinned. “These are kind of like you and me—recognizable but just a bit off center.”

The idea of imperfectly shaped eggs being somehow inferior and less appetizing or marketable seemed suddenly silly. After all, how many recipes do you know that call for unbroken eggs? Once the shell is cracked and tossed, who would notice its weird shape? And the outer form of the shell has no effect on the taste or nutritional value of the egg itself.

Looking at those eggs made me wonder about our perceptions of perfection. Whose ideas of faultlessness do we carry around in our heads and why do we subscribe to them? What constitutes our personal definition of perfection and does our idea of that change over time? Further, if we change our thought or expectation or desire, does that change the rightness of what we once held to be ‘perfect?’

I refrigerated all but four of the eggs. Then I fetched my recipe book and a bowl, cracked the four eggshells against its rim, and whipped the contents with milk and sugar into the smoothest of custards, which, when baked, turned out just perfectly.

Lately

For a while, the pond across the road was crowded, covered, awash with geese. Some days there was hardly any water visible between their bodies, and scarcely any silence between their calls. Periodically they arose in vast numbers and winged their way over my cottage, their bodies drawing flickering black lines in the sky like writing I couldn’t read. A few hours later they would return, having filled their bellies on corn gleaned from harvested fields. Lately, though, the pond has been quiet. Cold weather has driven the geese south and now the only sounds come from the small birds that winter here – the juncos, the sparrows, a few starlings, some nuthatches, and a pair of cardinals.

The afternoon sun hangs low in the sky and where the shadows gather the air has a bite to it. The wind whistles sharply of mittens and overcoats and scarves wrapped snuggly around the neck. Oak leaves skitter and dance to this new wind’s tune, and sheets hung out to dry snap smartly. When it rains it pours, but the gray, dismal days are interspersed with blustery ones when every cloud is scoured and swept away until all that’s left is pure, clean blue.

I like best the bright blue days. The sun rests on my shoulders like a warm hand, and I seek out some secluded, wind-blocked spot where I can rest my back against a tree and watch the light dance across the water in silver slippers. It is in such moments that I sense the poetry of life, the way everything moves to a rhythm – the breeze, the daylight, the season – until my heart picks up the steady measure of the universe and beats in time.

Bam!

My granddaughter S is soon to be nine years old. I remember the day her parents brought her home from the hospital. She was squalling at the top of her lungs as my son handed her to me. I took her in my arms and held her to my heart. She quieted immediately. That was the beginning of our special bond.

A few years later S was snuggled next to me on the sofa. Her new little brother J was on my lap. We were watching Dumbo for maybe the fourth time and had just gotten to the part where the circus elephants make a circle to keep Dumbo out when suddenly S knelt and put a hand on either side of my face. “Memeré,” she said, “we need to talk about something.”

I looked into her earnest little face. “What do we need to talk about?” I asked her.

“Love,” she said. “It’s like this. When you love somebody, just because someone else comes over to play and you play with them, it doesn’t mean you don’t love the other person as much, right?”

I wondered what had brought this on. “I think I know what you mean,” I told her. “Last time I was visiting, your cousin came here and you went off to play with her. It didn’t mean you loved me any less.”

“Yes,” agreed S, “and just because J is sitting on your lap, it doesn’t mean you don’t love me, right?”

Ah, so that was it. “S,” I told her, “when you were born, I got to pick you up. I could feel your little heart beating against mine and I fell in love with you right then. I will never, ever fall out of love with you.”

“Did you feel J's little heart beating when he was born and fall in love with him, too?” she asked.

“I did,” I told her, “but that doesn’t mean I love you less. My heart is big enough for both of you, and for lots of other people, too.”

She snuggled back down beside me. “Good,” she said.

Later that evening, when S and I were holding hands while we drifted off to sleep, I thought about love in all its various forms. We’re born with a need to be loved and the capacity to love in return. All our lives we need to be surrounded by love, and if it isn’t there, something in us turns up missing. Because love is so vast a concept, it’s hard to pin one definition on it. It is always greater than the sum of its parts, is more than the respect, the trust, the caring, the delight, and the tenderness that go into it. And here was this tiny morsel of humanity, holding my hand and worrying about how much she was loved, how love could be divided and not be less than whole, and how she could share the affection of those she loved and not come up wanting.

The next morning she told her mother, “You know what, Mommy? Memeré picked me up when I was born and she felt my heart beating on hers and BAM! That’s when it happened. We fell in love!”

Her mother looked at me and smiled. “I’m glad, S.”

“Me, too,” said S and she grinned up at me.

And that’s the way love should be – we should all hold our hearts against someone else’s and BAM! Think how big our hearts would be then.