Entry Eight: Thursday April 16, 2015 6:00 pm

I pause before entering my tree. Partly because I know that this is the official conclusion - that this may be the last time I step foot inside my tree and feel its boughs embrace me. And partly because of the bright red pellets littering the ground. I crouch down and retrieve a handful. The soppy bundle resembles cranberry relish at Thanksgiving, except it doesn’t stain my fingers crimson when I grind it up in my palm. Each pod peels away in layers, almost like the bud of a not-quite-ready flower. I glance directly above me, and realize that these red pellets just a week or so ago were starbursts cocooning fetal leaves. I thank them for their service, dust off my palms on my sweat pants, and creak to my feet.

Despite the soaked and slippery bark, I mount my tree easily. Right foot, left foot, swing over stump. I nestle into this place, ten to twelve feet high. My chest swells with pride when I think back to the instant when I was frozen with fear at the thought of spending my twenty minutes at such a height. Now I sit a queen on my tree-throne. I throw a hand around the supporting trunk and nuzzle it. I breathe in deeply. Scents of moist, just-turned earth fill my nose. They come from the neighbor’s, where they have uprooted every. single. plant. surrounding their house. I know the next time I smell this scent, it will be because we are growing new life rather than destroying it.

The tree and I withdraw from our embrace. Now I examine the newly sprouted, naked leaves. They droop towards the ground almost like a willow. I imagine each as a sopping creature, like a cat caught in the rain. The gray of the post-storm sky mutes the green color so it is almost indistinguishable from branches. The trees surrounding our property boast clusters of leaves like neon broccoli. Despite the unnatural appearance, I find myself wishing my tree’s leaves were more like theirs. I know they will be. It’s just that I can’t help but wish this awkward, teenage-like phase of my tree’s existence would hurry itself along so I can enjoy its shade and somewhat restored magnificence.

The steep pitch of the stump has finally beaten me, and I decide to dismount. Just as I turn myself around and begin to lower myself from my perch, my phone shrieks its deafening ringtone. My heart skips. My grip slips. I slide.

Within the first millisecond, the tree clings to my shirt, ripping it upwards and exposing my abdomen and chest. The fresh skin beneath from three inches below my right breast to three inches above grates against the bark. In the crux of the tree, my foot catches and twists before sending me tumbling backwards in an avalanche of river rock.

I blink. I am on my feet still standing on the concrete driveway. I don’t know how I am not in a heap on the ground. I also don’t know how my cell phone ended up in my hand. It is still screaming. I answer.

“Hey, can you move your car out of the driveway?” It is Nikki.

I turn back up the empty drive. “It isn’t in the driveway.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Click.

I stare from the phone screen back to the tree. I feel betrayed that my tree would not catch me. I feel idiotic that I could not catch myself. I feel pain radiating from the raw skin on my chest and the over-extended muscle in my ankle.

How did that happen? How could this happen during my last time in my tree?

I twirl my ankle gingerly, and cup my hand around my breast. I stare up at the height I’ve fallen and think of the other possible outcomes. I couldn’t been stranded in the tree for hours. I could’ve broken my foot on the tumble down. I could have fallen directly back and impaled myself on the fence. Whatever greater being wants me still around and wanted to teach me something during my last time in the tree.

Sometimes, I realize, “last times” aren’t what you expect. They aren’t beautiful sun sets and fully unfolded leaves. Sometimes they are gray skies, wounded pride and wounded parts. I decide it’s fitting that this would happen for my last week of the nature writing blog. We are all humans. We are part of nature yet outside it. Because we are lovers of nature or because we have spent enough time in nature to feel possessive over it, none of us is invincible. Kole wasn’t, Annie wasn’t, Wesley wasn’t. I’m not. And that vulnerability and fragility means pain, but it also means rarity and uniqueness. Life and nature are things that I’ve come to appreciate. Through the pain and heartache, I know there is a place that I can go to nurse wounds of all kinds: my tree.

Entry Seven: Tuesday March 31, 2015 6:00 pm

The wind ushers clouds across the sky at dizzying speeds. In only seconds, the dark grey forms have moved into frame from the right, across my line of vision, and beyond the peripheral sight of my left eye. Because the thunder clouds are only a shade darker than the sky that envelopes them, I have to focus very carefully to track their movement. The pages of my notebook fwop-fwop-fwop under the wind’s power. I slide my pen into the spiral binding and pocket the tiny pad to silence its unruly pages.

Still the wind demands to be noticed. It charges my face, forcing my nose to run and eyes to water. It drives the grass dry split ends of my hair to snap against the tree. My hands numb in that winter-familiar way that make jotting down notes painful. The wind brings with it, too, the scent of mountain fresh dryer sheets. I wrinkle my nose and will the unnatural smell away.

The wind bullies my tree as well, swirling its branches into a tornado. Red starburst bursts like scarlet chestnuts peppering the remaining branches of my tree are tossed about. I scan the trees surrounding my property and find that no others show signs of growth. My heart swells. I can’t help but wonder if the premature growth is at least in part from me pouring all of my energy into this tree. My prayers for regeneration have not been answered, but a consolation is served in the form of these tiny spiked bulbs. I find myself wishing that one would fall so I could examine it more closely. Despite the gusts and gales the starbursts cling to their branches. I decide this is best for they promise new life.

I watch them flap in the wind: branches reaching left, then right, and finally swirling in a circle. The movement is in like an inhale. I watch the bronchial tubes flex as they fill with air from the breeze. Suddenly I realize that more than a lung, this branch instead looks like a heart: the thick bough: an artery; the branches: capillaries.

I position myself so that I am sitting more on the small of my back than my behind and wedge my knee up against this bough. This way I can arch to watch my tree’s heart pump without my neck aching. Red with the blood of new life, enriched with the oxygen of the earth, my tree’s heart beats again. Just like Kole’s heart beats again; his heart valve salvaged six months ago was recently transplanted to an eleven-month-old girl.

A particularly strong gust of wind grabs hold of my tree. Against my knee, I feel the trunk flex almost imperceptibly away from me and back again. The movement must have been less than an inch. Feeling the solidity of a tree trunk move is like feeling the first movements of a baby through her mother’s stomach: foreign, almost alien; disturbing, yet the most natural gesture possible. I feel my pulse and breathing quicken and I shoot into an upright position. I’m dizzy but cannot stop the smile from blooming on my lips. I lean into the bough, embrace my tree, and wait for the next breath of life.

Entry Six: Thursday March 24, 2015 6:30 pm

My seat of river rock feels… wrong. I am used to the solid and level chair of a severed limb beneath me, my back resting on the bough behind. Today, the rocks shift below, sending me sliding. When I finally stabilize myself on the rocks of the garden next to my tree, I find that a cold, softball-size one has wedged itself between the back pockets of my jeans. My spine strains against the forced rigidity of holding myself upright and unsupported.

“A new perspective,” I say to myself, and try to focus on the aspects of the tree now at eye-level: peeling strips of bark like ingrown fingernails, roots reaching into the rock garden and diving below into the earth, the robotic movements of an ant as it step-step-step-step-steps its way up the trunk.

Caw! Caw! A call sounds from directly above. The call sounds again. This time I notice the subtle growl within the caw, making it almost mechanical. I am reminded of a mechanized bird sounding the alarm in a dystopian universe. The source of the noise is a sleek black bird sitting in the branches of my tree. Sitting in my tree. My heart somersaults within my chest.

Can I get up inside the tree without disturbing him? I wonder. My numb posterior and I say a silent thank you for the bird and we rise. Knocking over a dozen river rocks and almost taking a tumble myself, I hoist my stiff body into its usual spot. Besides the addition of several white-gray splotches of excrement on the full bough in front of me, it feels like home.

I crane my neck, leaning against my back rest (for which my spine is also thankful), and examine the mocking-jay-like bird for just a moment before he takes flight. I’m shocked that I can see each feather in his wingspan and hear the fwuht fwuht of feathers in the wind. My eye follows this bird to discover that my entire yard has become an aviary: gray-tailed birds with dark wings; auburn-breasted, white-torsoed ones with charcoal tails; black smooth-feathered birds with heads so dark they shimmer blue in the light; a red cardinal, showy and bold, muting the colors of everything around him.

The silence that I’ve come to associate with nature has been replaced by a deafening cacophony. One bird sounds like a swing set that needs oil: skree-ee, skree-ee. Another explodes in a burst of hysterical laughter: ha ha ha ha ha. One more resembles something like a breathy, lisping dove: twoot, twoot.

This new side of my yard buzzing with life catches me off-guard. I thought I would welcome the green grasses and warmer air, but the truth is, I don’t know how to handle it. After a winter of isolated and quiet reflection, spring feels imposing and invasive. My tree is host to a bird reunion and their chatter – probably shocked over the reduction of three boughs – scrambles my brain and keeps it from forming one beautiful, lyrical, or even cohesive thought.

This is the “after” part of life after death, I realize. After someone dies, we wonder how can anyone possibly go on now. How can the world keep turning and bills keep coming and games be played and hikes be made and laughs be had? Those are the questions that we all have after. What I learned from the birds is that it just does. Life goes on around you and it’s dizzying. But there is no other choice. The snow thaws; the birds return. And a marred tree or not, they keep going.

Entry Five: Wednesday March 4, 2015 5:45 pm

Upon experiencing snow for the first time, a blind acquaintance dubbed this foreign phenomenon “silent rain.” As I sit in my tree and listen to the audible ksh, ksh, ksh of crystallized ice colliding with the vinyl of my coat, I can’t help but disagree. I’m struck by how loud that sound is in the otherwise silence surrounding me. The flakes pelt my face with their initial sting, surprising because of their size. A single flake lands on my lip and I focus on the feathery cold as the snow dissolves from the tips of the flake inward. I breathe in and out as the flakes build up and up and up upon me – except they don’t at all because they melt as quickly as they land. Still I wonder what would happen if I drifted off to sleep right here. Would someone find me tomorrow buried beneath the blanket, sitting in a tree?

I open my eyes. The snow clings to the gaps in the bark. It makes the scales of bark stand out, highlighting where they curl up and away from the tree. I lean forward and exhale hot breath onto a patch of snow. I watch as the white fades to translucent, the substance pixelating as it sweats into water, dripping down the tree. The tree cries. The sky cries. I cry.

I feel four graves today. Two are familiar: Kole and my tree. Two are new – doubling my pain in a matter of hours.

The first of these new graves I can see from my tree. At the base of the hill, behind the shed maybe twenty yards away, the white snow is trampled in a circle by dirty, brown boot marks. You cannot tell it now, but the hole was dug by a newly purchased lifetime-warranteed shovel. It is somewhere between one and two feet deep. On top, lies cinder blocks slowly being covered in snow; within the hole lies our sweet Annie. Her disease was unmanageable. Her suffering: intolerable. Putting her down: unthinkable. But it had to be done.

The other grave I cannot see; it has not even been dug yet. It will house my cousin taken from this earth after a four year battle with osteosarcoma. Osteosarcoma is a cancer in the bones. It most commonly affects children and young adults, and it has one of the lowest survival rates for pediatric cancer. Frequently the cancer spreads from where it is initially found (for my cousin, the leg) to the lungs.  Despite limb-saving surgery, chemo, trials, fundraising, research, praying, praying, praying: another grave for another young boy.

I look back to my notebook to find that the melting snow has soaked through the page and blurred the ink into a sopping mess. The melt begins to seep through my pants and chills my legs as well. I crouch down further into the arms of the tree. I hug my knees and say to myself, “Just when I thought this was getting easier.”

Entry Four: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 5:45 pm

My feet dangle, swinging backward and forward until my heels bump into the solid trunk beneath me. I look down at the one, two, three steps it takes to reach this spot. I must have taken those three steps though they are a blur in my memory even now as I sit once again on the stump of the tallest severed limb. Right where Kole would’ve wanted to be. The key is not to allow myself the chance to think, to consider the consequences. I know this adrenaline is the reason why I did not freeze up this attempt. Because only now, after being seated for a minute or so, I begin to feel the bark-carved scrapes in my palms. The soft flesh is red, especially in the meatier spots, but it is not raw. I wring my hands, trying to rub away the stinging and cold. It will be worth it to watch the sunset from up here, I tell myself.

From where we live, up on the top of the hill, we get some truly magical sunsets. The kind where your breath literally catches, where the sky practically ignites. I wonder how many of those type of sunsets my tree watched in its lifetime. I straighten – make myself an extension of the tree, become the severed limb upon which I am seated: my eye level twelve feet about the ground. Silver Maples are known for how quickly they grow and reach maturity: often over 100 feet, sometimes up to 140. The upper branches draw my gaze, begging me to guess their height. Forty feet? I wonder, estimating that it doubles the height on my house. Fifty? My heart squeezes.

Just a baby.

I lean my head onto the trunk beside me. A cold, wetness dampens my face. I pull away to find a dark, oval-shaped splotch in the bark just below the chainsaw mark. My first thought is tears; logic intervened with the answer: snow melt. I run three fingers over the spot of dark bark and then rub fingers and thumb together. The consistency is not water, but almost like trumpet valve oil. Sap? I wonder to myself. But tears still feels like the truer answer.

I swallow and turn back to the horizon in order to see what this limb would if it were here. I expect the fiery oranges, burnt reds, and golden yellows, but instead I see pastels: a pale blue, painted with a swatch of pink. The sky could be a pre-packaged bag of dollar store cotton candy. My shoulders slump. I sit and wait and wait and wait, hoping for a prettier sunset. Even as the voice in my mind utters those words, I know how ridiculous the word “prettier” sounds, how unfair it is to ask for more from the world than for it to continue spinning, for the sun to sink down as elegantly or as plainly as it wishes with the hope that it will rise and do it all again tomorrow.

As I wait for this not-destined-to-be prettier sunset, I begin to feel an ache in my hips. I realize that for almost half an hour, I have been sitting on this stump severed at a severe diagonal. My hips have come to settle at a 30 degree angle: left hip stretched low, right compressed into my lower rib. I wiggle forward, struck by the dull, numb sensation in my lower extremities. Once freed, I rotate myself around, grip the bark with still-stinging palms, and slowly return myself back to the heart of the tree. The muscles in my stomach tremble and ache but rather than weakness, I sense the promise of strength.

Entry Three: Sunday, February 8, 2015 9:15

Hands braced against the Y of the limbs and quads prepped to flex and hoist my body into the tree, I pause. I allow myself to relax and instead melt forward, bending at the hips, until my shoulders are wedged tight between the branches. I stare into the palm of a four fingered hand. My left bicep rests against the sole intact limb; right against the tallest stump where I once stood. My normal seat, sheared shortest lies next and then the final severed finger as I continue counterclockwise. Despite having three mangled digits, the palm still cradles its cargo.

I wiggle left and right and left again to compress myself further towards this unexplored area: the crevice where I usually only plant my foot and continue climbing upwards. The shallowest part of this bowl holds dregs of tree tea. Blanched shards of pulpy wood look like the abandoned remnants of a kindergartener’s cereal. Awkwardly I maneuver my hand to reach and pick up a slender shard of bark. One side is a rough, dull gray. From the cross section I can see it is millimeters thick, a fraction of the remaining width which is a raw cherry color. I try to pin the bark back to a naked patch of tree. When I release, the bark tumbles back into the basin with a littering of leaves. Colors vary from ivory to gray, browns to almost-reds. Stringy stems jut out of the hash. Pulling one only strips it of its papery skin. I claw into the half frozen mound and try to release a whole leaf for observation, but again and again, the leaves only tear.

Below the stump-seat however – the deepest section of the basin – a pond has formed, a glistening frozen surface encapsulating what lies beneath. I see specks of dirt, bits of bark, twigs, and an almost whole, pristinely preserved leaf. I reach forward, straining against the clutch of the limbs on my shoulders to run a finger along the lake. A layer of cold sweat has formed over top. I press down, watch my nail turn deep pink, knuckle bleach white, the water below the surface flex. Still the ice refuses to crack. I examine the object behind the ice-glass. The flesh of the leaf is an orange-tan, almost flesh tone. Dark spots freckle the surface. Veins branch their way from the woody stem to its body with five jagged edges. I pause. Five. Jagged. Edges. I withdraw slightly. Blink once, twice. My heart sputters. Then detonates.

I clamber at the natural litter of the tree’s internal basin, scratching my shoulders and uppers arms on bark. I step back, drop to the ground, the stones cutting into my knees. I claw through the debris, searching for sign of a compound leaf with opposite branching. But all I find around are simple leaves, double serrated edges. Even as they disintegrate in my hands I know.

Not Ash.

My stomach turns. Who told me it was an Ash tree? I close my eyes as faces flash through my mind: the realtor, the inspector, the neighbor, only me? They fade. I can’t remember. How could I have been so stupid to think my tree was something different, unique, special? Like an Ash. When it is a simple, plain, common Silver Maple.

My lower back creaks as I stand. My exposed fingers sting so I retract them inside my sleeves. Wind blows through the fabric of my sweatshirt and forces the hair on my arms to stand. I swallow hard, staring through the blur of burning, salty water at the broken tree, reflecting on the past six weeks. While this tree- this common Silver Maple tree- held me as I held the memory of an irreplaceable boy. I lean my forehead against the gravelly trunk.

If you were a Ceiba, you could not mean more to me.

Entry Two: Sunday, January 25, 2015 10:00 AM

I’ve opted to lock Puss inside, hoping to be the only domesticated creature in the tree this time. Puss still joins me in the map of her paw prints tracing their way around our yard and into the neighbor’s. She must have been exploring the path of the deer who paid our neighborhood a visit last night. How strange to see the white tailed deer in suburbia, just feet from the neighbor’s door. We stood on our porch and watched her –a young female – for a few minutes. Despite my wish that she would crash through the neighbor’s living room, it doesn’t look like she did. For her sake, I’m glad.

I stand on the second to highest limb of the tree, and once again I examine the bark of the trunk in front of me. The texture of the bark is as I remember it, but in the gray light of morning I see layers I could not in the dying light of dusk: the gray elephant skin for an outer shell tinged darker by melting snow, the ashen brown where the shell has been picked away, and then the cherry color of raw exposed scabs. The flesh beneath has been torn into feathers almost like a paint brush. I imagine these wounds are scars of battle: wounds earned while trying to catch its brethren as they plummeted from above to the earth.

I place my hand up on top of the highest severed branch intending to swing myself up even higher just as I did two weeks ago. But I freeze. Not physically as today is a full five degrees warmer than last time. I even hear the soft thud of wet snow melting from the eves and landing on the pillowy ground. No, this time, I am gripped by the thought of what if I fall?

Did Kole ever wonder that?

I almost laugh. Kole wasn’t afraid of anything. If he fell off his pony, hardly a moment went by before he was hauling himself back on. Even as his quad was rolling, I guarantee he was thinking about getting back on it. Heat rushes into my face and salty tears blur my vision. I lower myself back onto the shortest stump in the center of the three branches. Even at that height of three feet, I am higher than the jump that rolled his quad. I lower myself onto my butt and shimmy myself so I am fully embraced by the braches: a knee on each of the ones in front of me, my back supported by the one behind me. The one that I couldn’t climb today. I won’t allow defeat to be the word of my visit to the tree. For Kole, I will try again next time.

For now, I listen to the caw of two crows talking back and forth. One I cannot see lies somewhere over my left shoulder beyond my house. The other stands at the very top of one of the lone trees in the neighbor’s yard. It used to have a mate directly beside it, one that held it and supported it for forty years or more. It was another casualty of the saw. This too-tall, too-skinny, too-alone tree sways precariously now. I wonder how long it will be able to exist without its mate. I look around at my own tree with its maimed bark, its split trunk, its missing limbs. Even with two crippled arms it holds me close – safe. That lone tree and my tree have something in common. Much was taken from them. They show their weakness in their sway and in their wounds, but in showing that weakness, they also show a strength to survive.