School had just ended on an early spring day, and I walked out of the building in the rush of teachers and students. I leaped up and grabbed a branch, swinging from it and feeling the tree’s joy in the warm sunlight, closing my eyes briefly. When I opened them, a teacher I didn’t know was staring at me and smiling.
“What’s a young student like you thinking on such a nice day?” she asked as I hung there, shifting her grip on her rabbit-headed cane.
“ Just wondering.” I answered. “Um. Do you ever wonder? If some of the things you know are real… are just in your mind? Are delusions?” I tried to sound nonchalant, but the teacher gave me a surprised look.
“Well!” she muttered, then added more cheerfully, “that wasn’t what I was expecting from a kid.” She stumped off, her face tilted toward the sky, and I jumped down from my tree and started off home.
I was thinking about last fall, when the maples looked like they were burning, and the thin incandescent wail of each falling leaf chilled my whole body. Everywhere I walked I was surrounded by a chorus of grief, a whole-hearted plant acknowledgement of winter. And after that there was silence the whole winter long, and even the great copper beech outside my window only whispered deep under its bark. Now leaves dance in the sunlight, I thought, and I passed under the gingko tree.
The little tree screamed so hard into the space beneath it that I almost fell down in shock. I ran to comfort it; I placed both hands on its thin trunk and poured love into the tree, poured hope and healing like green fire that dripped down my knuckles. Green, green, I thought and I saw the great gash oozing where feet of gray bark had been stripped away. I imagined the bark knitting together like skin, imagined a sweet strength holding the tree like a cord. I imagined pulling strength up through the ground but our sadness had still turned the air solid when I leaned back and tore myself away.
In spring, leaves dance in the sunlight. I stumbled vaguely down the sidewalk, trying to shake the gingko’s grief at its dead cells and lost bark. I hardly noticed I was home until the great branch of the beech tree loomed over my head, and I leaned gratefully against its warmth.
“…confusion… sadness?” asked the tree.
I projected how the gingko had felt. The tree took the thought and smoothed it into a calm acceptance. Its new leaves twinkled, still translucent in the light. Its trunk stretched higher than I could see, and its roots deeper.
“…can’t change…can’t help or hurt…” glimmered the beech as I leaned into its roots. “…grow and be you…” It sent me its calm happiness at the day, and the life blooming around us. It was right. I couldn’t heal the gingko, or change hearing what others could not. But I could lie in the shade of a friend who would always know me. I could watch the shadows in the leaves until I fell asleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment