Homeboy Emptying Home
June 22, 2021: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT
5:07 a.m. (same time as yesterday, one minute later than Sunday, June 20). 66 (humid) degrees, wind SSW 2 mph. Last night's well-spaced thunderstorms lit the valley, watered the woods, freaked out the dogs, accented a red-shouldered hawk that circled beneath the blockade of bruised and angered clouds. I walked into the husk of Jordan's room and watched the storm hurl crooked harpoons into the marsh, breath and memory echo off empty walls. Sky: saturated air, rising fog meets low clouds, woods dull grayish-yellow light and dripping; forest debris strew about the road, the lawn, the driveway, the roofs of shingled houses. Permanent streams: surfs up (for the moment), a temporary fix that noisily tumbles west. Storm enlivened catbirds, which sing and call from thickets along both streams—emperors of the alders, ministers of the willows—a chorus of joyous improvisation. Wetlands: encapsulated haze; veeries animate the mist, descending spirals, self-serving duets. Pileated cuts lose, penetrating drumming rolls through the fog like ambitious thought. Pond: oddly, the water level unchanged, striders and whirligigs amid shoals of pine needles. Painted turtle upright in the water, head periscoping, sinks as I pass. Famished mist rises to knee-level, unencumbered . . . then gone.
DOR: southern flying squirrel on the driveway, cutest rodent on the Earth. The heavy irony of death: round head, big expressive eyes, small ears, and an oar for a tail.
AOR: pair of immature crows scavenge eastbound earthworms, slowed by sleeves of grit. Fearless birds move slowly downhill, eat and hop. Eventually, one flies onto an overhanging limb; the other disappears into the fog.
In front of me, ancient aspen liberates a limb. Dogs freeze, but black-throated blue warbler, unfazed, carries on, singing while the forest reconfigures. Big-toothed aspen: bark gray, fissured into broad flat ridges (oak-like), weak wood, shallow-rooted, short-lived. Tree leaning, branches rise in supplication as though begging for longevity. For several years, I've waited for the tree to fall, for the roots to let go after a torrential downpour. Yet this tree, of no great fame, wrote Donald Culross Peattie (1948), only moderately beautiful, and plebian in its uses, has its secrets. Herewith are my five: one, the triangular leaves, flame yellow-orange in late October, when the rest of the hillside cools; two, grouse and evening grosbeaks eat the buds; three, woodpeckers nest in the wood; four, aspen rots quickly, nursing slower-growing, more durable hardwoods; and five, when the wind blows, the leaves speak in tongues, I hear the ocean, the sound of my boyhood . . . the flow of rampant time.
Catbirds wake me at first light, everywhere and vocal. Many more in the Hollow this year than last. Phoebe chicks on the pasture fence, tail-flicking and tolerant. Yellow, black, and white, evening grosbeak stops at the birdfeeder, empty for weeks. Checks for seeds in the hollow tube. A phantom feeding station, like a phantom limb, triggers visceral memory. Grosbeak revisits a dependable era, a prisoner of its past.
Besides the uptake of oxygen, the grosbeak and I have something in common. Every night I prepare to read in a chair that's no longer there.
Your own 5 secrets of a particular "plebian in its uses" ancient aspen inspired me to find our mutual friend and sage, John Hay writing on our relationships with trees:
"The less we are able to admit common feelings into our relationship with trees, the more impoverished we become: it must indicate a deforestation of the spirit. Strangely enough, their least understood qualities lie in the sensate natures they share with the rest of life. When I walk through cut over areas where pasture birch, young sugar maples or white pines are growing back, I sense they have a will of their own, an ability to come back that is more than automatic. After all, they are providers. They nurture multiplicity, from root to crown. Just as every life that associates with trees must communicate in one form or another, so trees themselves seem to respond to each other. We have hardly started to explore our mutual chemistry. On a high and open night in the winter, all blazing with the laddered, climbing stars, it is not accidental that the branches of the trees should reach and gestures as they do, or that one's spine should tingle at the lineup of the constellations. We were both constructed to that end."
- John Hay, The Immortal Wilderness, 1987.
And Hay's everlasting benediction (for me) is here:
"It is an unfortunate man or woman who has never loved a tree."
Too late I came to your blog, and much too late I began saving the postings I received. Will you be putting them altogether in a book about your time in Coyote Hollow? Only Kerry Clifford's Cancered Plans has taught me so much while touching my soul and breaking my heart as much as your pieces.