photograph by anna traverse
The light fades from amber to smoke-gray as Lily Bear the dog and I rustle along one of the paths in the Old Forest, damp leaves whispering as they yield to our paws. Somewhere close but indiscernible, a barred owl calls out, HOO-hoo-hoo-hoo, plaintive and strange and comforting at once, or so the song sounds to my limited and limiting human ears. Fall is nearly fallen, day draws close to night; we are in the crepuscule of the year, and the barred owl is hooting in the woods.
Pausing to listen once more, farther along the path — if you can be farther along a path that winds like a vine back to the same places again and again — I look up at a tree that’s performing a kind of miracle. Gashed by lightning, the sugar maple is almost entirely without a trunk: where its ringed core should be, where xylem and phloem would do their work, there is only air and shadow. For a length of 20 feet or more, extending upward, only one crescent-shaped edge of bark and sapwood remains; higher, a narrower, newer line of trunk forks to one side, and from that section, leaf-covered branches sway, heedless of any scars or hollows below. You could fit another tree into this one’s concavity. And yet: leaves.
This is a letter of recommendation, I suppose, for forming a relationship with a tree. Pick one that grows in a place you visit often, one that draws your eye as its leaves go from green to gold to gone. Stand beneath its shade in summer; notice its outlines in winter, when dark limbs look like nerves etched on the sky.
Know that the tree may break your heart, and that this, too, will be a gift.
In the waning moments of the year, when the barred owl sings, it’s good to be reminded that newness is always, always possible, is in fact already contained within us, sure as the leaves that push through and uncurl anyway.
The tree I return to over and over is a sweetgum, also in Overton Park’s Old Forest, and rooted just by the paved trail on the northern edge of the park. For as long as I can remember — because I had never noticed it pre-transformation — the sweetgum has stood in a perfect arch, a rainbow, a backbend, one half of a whole world. Plenty of trees lean practically to the forest floor and then keep living and leafing anyway, but this one is sturdier than most, older, its flexibility less certain. If you laid a mirror beneath the tree, it would appear to be a spinning portal into … elsewhere.
Or would have, until the ice last winter. The thinnest upper extent, heavy with ice, snapped and tumbled. The half-circle is missing about 30 degrees now, and the splintered tip is painted ochre with fungus (the photo above is from Before). When I visited the tree during the ice storm, looked up, and saw its missing piece, my eyes may or may not have filled with saltwater. But then spring came, and with it: leaves. Leaves! Curved parabolically toward the earth, encroached by fungus, now partially severed, and guilelessly sprouting fresh celery-bright tendrils.
If the sugar maple and the sweetgum could compare notes, I imagine they would have a lot to say to each other: about resilience, about loss, about hope, about some dog-walking woman and whether she’s anthropomorphizing trees. Still, though, in what might have been (and indeed might be) their waning moments, when these beings might have tumbled to the earth and decomposed, they breathe out new leaves in the springtime anyway, and in the autumn, turn copper and gold.
In the waning moments of the year, when the barred owl sings, it’s good to be reminded that newness is always, always possible, is in fact already contained within us, sure as the leaves that push through and uncurl anyway.
