Tree

 

 

 

August 16, 2021

 

Greetings from the sap,

 It’s a thankless job, being a tree.  As I write this, just outside my window, there is a row of giant white pines that have stood there all their lives, decades, and not once have I considered thanking them.  Well.

 Their neighbors, the maples and oaks, edge the yard, form the forest that is the home to deer and rabbits and fox and countless other things that love it there.  These trees do their work without notice, not expecting to share in some communal glory.  They don’t pout for the lack of attention, at least from us. 

 They raise up, hold the myriad stars in the sky, or the dense blue plate, easing the sun from one branch to the next as the world asks for the day.  They shoulder the snow, they give shelter to families of birds, collect sun, absorb what we breathe out and scrub it clean, make hiding places for small animals.   They frame the horizons so that the color of our beginnings and endings have contrast and texture.

 They dance in the wind, the edge of graceful, a ballet perhaps for themselves, but still a performance for us.  They softly clap their leaves together in delight, partnering with the wind, usually, to create music, to add as much movement as a tree is allowed in life. 

 These trees, and the ones you know, create shade, mute the harsh sounds that would jar us.  Out on my deck, I can sit in a chair with a cup of coffee, listen to the rain sigh on the maple tree that keeps the damp at bay, my living canopy.  Mrs. Leafly gives me this gift with no expectations. 

 These living things that do this and much more we can’t see, who ask little of us, and do not seek our gratitude, these noble things that make possibilities for all of creation.  Saplings in Maine, Redwoods in California, all bound by a heritage older than human existence.

 I try to avoid conversations that feature the weather.  It usually feels like what people will talk about when they are too timid to talk about other things, or perhaps too tired to conjure the imagination to find something more interesting.  So if someone told me a storm was coming, I missed it. 

 This was a violent storm, vindictive and angry.  Smarter people described a ‘microburst’, which is a terrible misnomer, since there was nothing small about it to us.  A terrible surge of energy punished the world here, and its chief victims were trees.

 Some were snapped, some ripped up from their roots and thrown to the earth.  Giant trees, older than me, shredded into something else, broken, split, splintered, ended.  I ran through the park, looking at their carcasses, the bits of noble things now humble detritus.  I wondered if they feel, if other trees mourn their loss, in some tree way.

 There was the angry noise of chainsaws, reducing the trees into something smaller yet, making room for us to live where we want to, to go where we want to.  It was a terrible dirge to mark the passing of these beautiful things.  Maybe because of other thoughts that filled my mind, I found myself mourning the trees.  And then the moment was redeemed.

 The author David James Duncan wrote about trees, a simple but brilliant paragraph I’m afraid you won’t find, so I’ll share some of it here.    “…we marveled that the bodies of trees are built by their downward hunger for earth and water and their upward yearning for light.” A paradox that might destroy other things causes the tree to grow strong.  And this:

 “..during the tree’s afterlife, its former hunger and yearning transmogrifies into the enduring structural integrity known as wood.  Wood is a tree’s life history become something so solid that we can hold it in our hands. This is not just some lonely cry or mournful eulogy.  Right here in the world where every living thing dies, a fallen tree’s integrity remains so literal that if a luthier adds string to it we can turn the departed tree’s sun-yearning and thirst-quenching into the sounds we call live music.  And if a seeming lunatic smashes the wood’s integrity to a pulp, then makes that pulp into paper, our ink can bring to life stories that multitudes can perform like symphonies in the sanctums of their very own depths and heights.” 

 I am a woodworker, a modest example but nonetheless it is something I have a passion for.  I realize more why.  I love the aroma of saw dust, of freshly cut wood.  I like the feel of wood being planed or sanded, the shape and texture.  I like the bit of moisture there in the flesh of the grain, that proof of its living history.  I love trees, I love the product of their life.

 A few feet from here is a table I made from maple trees.  Their life, already full and beautiful, extended into mine, into my family’s lives, and now our history is intertwined.  The table is scuffed and scratched from countless meals and homework sessions and card games and birthday celebrations.  The tree’s literal integrity, born of wind and sun and earth and rain, did not end when the tree fell.  It simply began again, with me, in this new life.

 I am a writer, a modest example but nonetheless it is something I have a passion for.  In the tradition of writers, my work will be printed on paper, the grandchildren of a tree whose days of sighing in the wind are finished.  But whose legacy is continued, in partnership with the words that form my own. 

 In my small way, I have found a way to thank trees for their gifts to us and all the living things they hold in their boughs.  It is a strange sentence to write, but I feel a sense of debt to these parts of creation, and it delights me to think that somehow my life now acts as gratitude for their beauty. 

 Even so, when I finish writing this sentence, I am going out to see the guardian pines and thank them for all they bring to my life. 

 

Hope this finds you grateful,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith