The Calm After the Storm
I clear the path of fallen branches because it’s Sunday and I have more time for such industrious dawdling on the morning walk.
Weekday excursions are a more focused affair, with poetic encounters and soul-cleansing gratitude, to be sure, but always an eye on the inner clock that gets me to work more or less on time. But Sunday walks…ahhh…they are the blank page opened before my willing feet, a time to stroll more leisurely among the coming season’s project list and on occasion, take the trimmers with me, listening to the laughter of a blackberry vine’s thorns echo in my ears long after I return to the house.
A second straight weekend of straight-line winds with 55mph gusts drove some of the arms and fingers of our walnuts and maples into the ground, like nails into soft wood. They poke out randomly along the path at rakish angles and I leave them be, an art installation to surprise our next round of house guests. Large deer hoofprints wend their way among the sticks, crisscrossed with raccoon and coyote pawprints and a leaving or two of their scat, which I’m rather impressed I can identify by now. We are never alone here, and it’s most reassuring to step among the proof of that. The tiniest of twigs carpet the ground and I resist the temptation to build little fairy houses out of them, knowing that a day’s worth of granola baking awaits me in the warmth of our clean kitchen. A project for a warmer, less scheduled day, and in the presence of imaginative children who are dear to us.
There are certain trees that I visit on the walk, one of them a young sycamore sapling I found a couple of years ago, bent double to the ground after an early summer windfest, broken save for a strap of her sinewy bark holding both halves precariously together. I ran back to the house and scrambled frantically among my cotton sheeting scraps like a wartime Red Cross volunteer looking for bandages and found just enough to wrap the wound and set her upright again. I tethered her young trunk gently to a rusty t-post I grabbed from the potting shed on my way back to where she lay patiently wondering what could be done to save her. She took her medicine well and has survived half a dozen such storms since, determined to heal and grow into the unfolding seasons in perpetuity (fingers crossed, touch wood). We have that in common, so I stop and greet her each time I walk, wrapping my hand around the coolness of her slender branches one at a time. I press my cheek against a lower limb that stretches toward the west and tell her how proud I am of her tenacity. I’ll pass by her again on my double loop through the field, so we agree to save our farewells until then.
About twenty feet off the main path, I step into a mixed grove of blue beech, towering black walnuts and assorted ash trees, well-established and clearly the gatekeepers of this diverse vertical community, leaning my forehead against their rough bark one at a time as I exhale a whispered good morning and thank you to start our respective days. The reasoning of the wind is beyond my simple comprehension, so I’ve stopped asking why these sentinels are still standing while others lay at their feet, spent and taken too soon. Since it’s still Sunday, I settle myself onto the huge trunk of a fallen black walnut stripped of its bark and wait for the overture to begin.
It opens with the single staccato tapping of a woodpecker I can’t see, boring a hole into both tree and silence with regular pauses, the timing of which I can’t sequence. He solos for several minutes this way until another one takes up the sound on its own perch several yards to the south. Having made their point, the woods go quiet until a trio of Canada geese honk their way overhead, the leader’s wingspan missing two of its feathers on the right as their song fades into the distance. Next comes the deer snorting section of the orchestra and now we’re in a full on symphony that blurs the line between rehearsal and performance. I realize it would be a tad improper to leap up and burst into applause, so I re-set my wonder and gratitude to an inward place where I will store this scene for all eternity. No intermission in this Concert of All Living Things, and it never, ever ends.
Can it be that it was just yesterday at this exact time the wind was playing the trees’ canopies like so many stringed instruments, plucking at and rubbing their woody fingers together, relentlessly coaxing out mournful melodies for hour upon hour? How can it be, this contrast of motion and near-silence that envelopes us all, as if nothing even happened on the back side of last night’s sunset? We all found our own ways to work around the previous day’s drama—the market managers wisely moved us back inside to the winter season location (we were to relocate outside for April until they saw the forecast), cardinals still scritched out their cheerful calls and white-throated sparrows chased each other in the mulberry branches, while specks of high-flying redtail hawks caught the thermals and coasted across the cloud-scuttled sky. The roaring wind pushed through us all without apology. I left the front deck’s yellow wooden bench on the lawn where it landed, promising to put it back once things had settled down a bit. Patrick and I stooped to gather branches that were everywhere on the grass around the house, snapping them over our knees so they’d fit better in the garden cart that we’d later wheel back to the sweat lodge and add to the kindling pile. I called up the morning’s image of that forest symphony and smiled inwardly at our bend toward activity even while cherishing those moments of stillness.
Out among the hundreds of hopeful silver and red maple saplings in the field just south of the woods, a small nest (architect yet unidentified) sits in the crotch of one of them, securely anchored and unassuming in its durability. I’ve watched it for the past year, unmoved by the storms of the last three seasons, perfectly shaped, intact and going nowhere. Brambles climb toward it now but it seems not to notice at all, just content to be its strong and quietly confident self, having served its purpose last spring as dwelling and incubator for its long-gone temporary residents. I doubt new renters will move in this spring but who knows? Real estate this sturdy won’t stay vacant for very long. Like those select trees I’ve come to know and understand even a little, I pause on the walk and consider what this nest is teaching me, setting aside my own misguided hubris to listen carefully. Whatever storms may come as the next few months unfold, I hope we’ll both endure, with quiet confidence and grace.
