Another Trip Around the Sun
Along the banks of the creek, at the foot of the Old Man sycamore tree, the wild asters open their tiny white faces to the east for a fleeting glimpse of the morning sun. Not even two hours past sunrise, they’ll spend the rest of the day in cool shade and dappled sunlight until the last winds of autumn strip the overhead branches bare. I love how they are not a bit bothered or preoccupied by headlines, deadlines, or the ticking of a timepiece. They simply push past the soil’s crumbly top layer, wedge themselves between the sawgrass and the ironweed and unfold their petals without fanfare. I register the tiniest shred of envy in my heart and then let it go. Who knows what they must long for sometimes from my own existence? Chocolate, perhaps, or the ability to embroider?
It’s my birthday (on a Saturday too—how’s that for luck?), and I’ve parked myself on a blanket down in the meadow with a full and grand view of the slope up to the house. I’m sitting in the lap of All Things Sacred, encircled in a leafy embrace and deeply aware that to unwrap this gift, I need only open my eyes. As I sift through twenty years of Naked Acres images collected with those same eyes, I try to remember what this exact spot looked like when Patrick and I first stood here. I distinctly recall watching in silent mouth-open awe as two red tailed hawks circled over our heads against a backdrop of an ice-blue late March sky. In a smooth but quick flash, they suddenly locked talons and spiraled downward in some unseen column of love and air, their spring courtship a clear sign that we would get to unfold our young marriage into this space, gathering our shared stories beneath the ever-changing and always-perfect skies.
I cannot guess how old that Old Man sycamore is, but can tell you that Patrick and I could not clasp hands and fully encircle him. A round and rusty cast iron fence post, from the previous residents’ dairy farming days decades ago, looks as if it’s sinking slowly into the bark at the base of this tree’s magnificent trunk, a strange sort of vertical quicksand illusion. Bits of razor wire hold fast to the cold metal, barnacle-like and crusty, and a coiling vine of determined poison ivy snakes up the length of the post on its way to a branch that hangs over the creek. It all looks excruciatingly painful and yet, there’s a feeling of patient acceptance; this Grandfather has withstood worse and kept on growing. A metaphor of grieving moves across my thoughts’ path and comes to rest: tempting as it is to cut that fence post out from the thick bark in that massive trunk, such a thing would be more harm than help. Best to leave it be. Old Man has made this post part of himself and moved on. So it is with the losses that leave their mark on us. We grow around the hurt and bring it with us on the journey.
Will trees ever stop teaching us? Oh, I hope not.
The cricketsong is nonstop now, in classic symphonic end-of-summer fashion, the soundtrack of leaves falling in random showers and wind-swirls. It will be cold and silent all too soon, so in spite of my tinnitus, I welcome the continuous rhythmic scratchety music of these invisible relatives and send up another bucketload of thanks for the surgeon who fixed my otosclerosis back at the turn of the century. Most certainly a gift that has kept on giving, loud and unmistakably wonderful. I took Friday off, an early present to myself, and spent the morning clearing path through the woods between the fasting site and the trail up the Hill. Lopers in hand and under the tender supervision of a patient tree frog who watched my every move, I cut back thickets of tenacious multiflora rose vines, collected fallen black walnut and sassafras branches and broke them across my knee, and pulled Virginia creeper vines from the trunks of young saplings with my gloved hands. I lost all sense of time and sank into the woods like a fairy creature. It was simply splendid.
That I even get to keep marking this day, year after year, is not a casual occasion for me. I’ve had my share of knife’s-edge moments, and for reasons known and unknown, have been given the privilege of twenty-four more hours over and over and over until I land on this birth anniversary again, looking over my shoulder at a pile of miracles and peering into the mist of a mysterious future not promised to me or anyone else. When I do the math and add up the sunrises, the winters-into-springs and even the trips to the grocery store for Fuji apples, I’m stunned down to my socks at the sheer unrelenting abundance of the life I’ve been given to live.
In the shelter of an Old Man’s leafy and knowing arms, a canopy of history filtering the sun that woke me up this morning, I sit in silent mouth-open awe once more, buckled up for what this next trip will bring. If that sun keeps coming up, I’m gladly and gratefully along for the ride.
