fall
on my face.
I'm lying in a puddle of leaves. I raked them together just for my pleasure of jumping in, falling backwards and scattering the pile across the yard, again. The leaves on my face rush upwards away from me. They rise back to the trees reattaching themselves.
They turn from brilliant reds and oranges - back to green. The tree branches stretch and groan beneath their weight. Each leaf feeds the tree with a mixture of chloroplast, converting the sunshine into sugar - the building blocks of carbon. When a tree is cut, the remaining nutrients rush from their veins, just like blood from ours - and surge into a neighboring tree. Many people don't know the trees intertwine and graft their roots together, sharing in the bounty of other trees.
We've all been told, you can tell how old a tree is by the rings inside. Each ring has a width, some wide some thin. The thin rings tell a history of the year, very little water and nutrients. The larger rings when the tree had exponential growth. You can count back to a specific drought or a bountiful year of rain.
I close my eyes and gently caress the bark like a blind girl reading braille. I can hear and feel the history as I push my fingers into a wound. A family of ants run over my hand, wondering where I've come from, this alien form on their path home. Their antennas wiggle as they pause on top.
If I could stand still here, silent, I'd be absorbed. The tree would hold my hand and we'd grow old together. I imagine the surprise of a random person's face when they crossed this path and see a skeleton in an embrace with this tree.
The leaves are turning lighter shades of iridescent green. They are growing smaller, rolling back into their buds. The stretching limbs recede. The trunk grows thinner. The giant tree I love is just a small fragile sapling. I caress the top of it. It feels like soft grass. It disappears into the ground, just a random seed that fell from its mother. How it found its way into this soil, in this place, where a small sparrow had fallen from its nest providing a bed of fertilizer, is the mystery I am confounded by.
The giant elms line the drive leading up the white farm house with the red barn and the giant grain silo. The kids have strung a pulley inside the silo, across the top, beneath the arching dome. They jump on and swing from side to side. I'm scared of drowning in the barely. I hold on tightly, until I'm on the other side. Everyone is cheering.
The street trees wait patiently for the rain to trickle through the grate. Their stunted growth makes them into bonsai for us to drive our bicycles under. I'm a bit tipsy as I weave down the sidewalk ringing my bell with an open bottle of wine in my basket.
The trees on my property are aspen. They grow together as one giant organism, like a field of very tall, strong grass. I feel guilty when one of them is cut. I hope its like a haircut and they feel no pain, but simply strut around feeling sharp, knowing room has opened for one more of them to grow.
The giant firs tower on the mountain side. They grow up the slope until the ridge line stops them saying: "No further. Our peaks must rise in grandeur to greet the sun. We beg you to retreat, there are no nutrients here for you to take." A big horned sheep jumps past the trees and looks back as if to say "join me as I play and cavort in my surefooted ways".
The size of the trees in the Olympic National Forest off the coast of Washington State are hard for anyone to fathom, unless you've stood beneath their glory. The pacific temperate rain forest allow these trees years of moisture and constant nutrients. Stretching wide, their branches hang with moss, dripping with the beauty of age.
Together each ecosystem takes our human pollutants and transforms it into new clean oxygen, as the lungs to our planet.
I hold my tree with baited breath...just to hear it whisper and sigh. And so it goes...
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