Talking to Trees
Saturday, February 21st, 2009
Bare tree with a life all its own today, your arms lifted by the marionette wind. No buds for you, yet. They are still a month away. For now, your skin is smooth over the branches as though it’s summer and you’ve been freshly shorn. The knots are blistering and cold and they bend with your trunk, as elbows and knees might flex.
Watch the metal crossing signs deep-shoved into the ground near you waver and ripple, the metal doing tricks not possible in warmer months. Bitter cold has crippled the city and your caretakers today. No precipitation falls, only biting wind gusts that move everything but the thinning lawn.
The luxuries of the last grass are not so glamorous as your dance, to grow out to the tip and be forced to withstand the winter until spring and the blade begins anew. To accept the first snow and the last snow, to freeze solid with sleet and be buried for days or weeks in white blankets. Now they are holding roots, clasping together with other dead grass so as not to blow into oblivion, to be swept across the prairie and connect in leaf piles or forest lines or black stairwells, caught under heating units or some other place unnatural. They will eventually wither and disappear as all things living do, never to see the replacements come in.
The whole landscape has autumn’s death stamped in it today, winter’s gray skies, soon to be followed by the occasional reluctant spring day in which the birds return for the summer and depart on the cold wind the next morning after mistakenly following a warm swell northward. And their departure is more depressing than the earlier one when the leaves drop. The skies go birdless and leave your branches empty, the grass refuses to give and for another month, every living thing – even a man – waits for sun and water. We are brothers in that.
