A Gift by Special Delivery

 

We live in a magical time of consumerism, don’t we? I mean, make a wish—“I’d really like a pair of flannel pajama pants with dogs on them”—and here’s a pair for you in The Big Shopping Warehouse of Rocketman Jeff.

Can you imagine this for someone in the late 1800’s? “Oh no! The paddle on your butter churn broke! It’s gonna take Grandpa a day or so in the barn to make one. Oh, wait—we can order a new paddle. Better yet, let me just order you some Kerrygold butter from Whole Foods. Yeah, the milk comes straight from Irish cows so you know it’s good….”

Ah, it’s lovely, isn’t it? And weirdly, part of the charm is getting that brown box at the door—especially when we didn’t order anything. I love opening my front door to find something a friend or family member has sent. “Hey, kids!” (Of course I mean Maya, Maudie, and Jenny.) “Look what someone sent us! Let’s see what it is!”

Exactly one year ago this month, I received an unexpected gift. But it didn’t come in a brown box, and it wasn’t left on my front door. It definitely came from a friend, though, and it was left in my back yard, more specifically, in the planter. You can see a photo of it here; Nature gifted me with that young cottonwood tree you see at the top of this post.

Quite a beauty, isn’t she? Of course, she didn’t start out that way. She started out like this:

Can you believe it? A tiny seed like that! There are cottonwoods that grow in the nearby ravine (aka “Coyote Gulch”), and they slough off their seeds in the spring breezes like Californians shed sweaters. The air is filled with these floating puffs of seed pods, reminiscent of the Who Horton heard.

One of those puffs blew into my yard, and one single seed—somehow—took root. Sometime in September, when I was weeding that section of the planter, I discovered a tiny baby tree. My first thought was, “Oh, honey, you can’t grow up here. There won’t be enough water, and your roots will eventually wreak havoc on the block wall.” That’s me. Always leading with the pragmatic aspect of my being.

My next response was this: Thank you, Nature, for gifting me with this tree, a place for the little finches to rest in the heat of the day and perhaps even nest one day when the branches are tall enough and strong enough (instead of inside my aluminum patio cover). Thank you for offering a place for Jenny and Maudie to find shade where there was none before. They love to lie up there in the tall grass, but by summer it has dried to a crisp brown in the heat. In seasons ahead, they will have shade. And so will I, on that side of the house.

I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me; cottonwoods spring up quickly and fall down easily and break branches in strong winds and ask me if I care. I don’t. I wanted to worry about all those things, but you know what? I already have so many things to worry about—the health of my aging cat, the health of my aging friends, hell, the health of my beloved country—this one tree can do what it’s going to do. Nature offered it. Nature must care for it. I’ll just stand back and enjoy the benefits.

And maybe, from time to time, I’ll climb up there and give that tree a hug. Because that’s just who I am. Thanks, Nature. I love you!

 

Three trees and a dog

 

I park in the lot above the meadow in Bogart Park. It’s early and cool. As I step out of the truck, the quiet settles on me like the light embrace of a beloved friend.

This is how I know it’s October: The slight bite in the air. The scent of wood smoke that drifts down and hovers in the meadow. The tone of the leaves rustling; soft and lilting in mid-summer when the leaves are new and tender, it is a crisper sound now, as they dry and die and fall.

Maya alights from the truck eagerly, her nostrils twitching. She knows where we are, where the trail begins, and she heads that way at a trot before I’ve barely had time to close the door and hit the lock button.

Finding the trail, she pulls to the end of her twenty-foot leash and takes the rolling hills as if they are red-carpet flat, while I laugh, struggling to keep up as I tell her, “My, slow down, honey.” But she is thrilled to be out here, so I let her charge on, and my tempo increases as my boots kick up dust.

She slows when we reach the big hill. She doesn’t like this trail because she cannot see around the corners as we wind up and around on the climb, but she comes along beside me as I reassure her. Halfway up, she veers over to a single-track trail, a deer path that she has asked so many times to follow. Every other time, I have said no. Today I tell her, “Okay, My, let’s go your way,” and once again she is charging along. I gently slow her down; I have to watch her feet and mine for rattlesnakes, as it is still warm enough to see them out.

I know where this trail goes, and I know it will double the distance of our walk today. But it is a trail I have taken before with Sgt. Thomas Tibbs, and one I have loved—though not chosen—for several years.

We wind down to the far side of the hill, Maya surprised to find the trail opening up and skirting an expansive meadow. She glances often to our right where she can hear the penned sheep that sometimes graze here.

Then we come to the first tree.

 

A fire in the fall of 2016 burned much of this side of the hill down to rubble. Black ash is still visible in the soil along the trail. But look at these oak trees. Strong. Steadfast. Beautiful. How old is this one? How many fires have threatened it? Still it endures.

The last oak we pass before taking the steep trail back up toward the parking lot boasts a picnic table beneath it. Maya waits patiently as I snap a photo… and I imagine myself sitting down with a book or a notebook and a snack, whiling away a few hours in the shade… in the quiet… in the solitude.

 

Maya does that all-over dog shake—as Frost’s “little horse” did when the poet stopped to watch the snow fall in a similarly hushed and serene place.

I, too, have promises to keep.

So we tackle the last arduous climb, then pause briefly in the shade to catch our breath before heading back to the truck and civilization.

There is another way I mark the path into October, and that is by the shorter days, the diminishing light. At one time, October was my least favorite month. As the darkness came on, my spirits would flag, my anxiety rise, often leaving me depressed until January.

No more. The cure for darkness is light. So I will be out here as often as I can be, letting Maya charge up the trail (as long as it’s safe to do so), pushing myself to walk farther each time, to take the longer route, the steeper trail, to hear my heartbeat pounding, to know that I am still alive, still surviving, and will be when the light returns once again in spring.

Before I sleep

Robert Frost wrote a poem much beloved of Nature-philes and English teachers: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” You may recall it from your school days—“Whose woods these are, I think I know….” The narrator sits in a sleigh far from home, watching his neighbor’s woods fill up with snow. The little horse pulling the sleigh “gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake,” and we can almost hear the solitary jingle of those sleigh bells in the silent night. “The only other sound’s the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.”

Many a time I’ve stood in the forest on a dark snowy night, listening to nothing else but the whispered soughing of the wind in the trees and the slight padding, just below our conscious hearing, of snowflakes piling up. The experience, to the uninitiated, might seem fraught with loneliness. But… “the woods are lovely, dark and deep….”

Frost was not happy in his life of tending a farm to survive financially when all he really wanted to do was read literature and write great poems. I understand. Another season, another potato crop.... Eventually, though, the poet came to balance his time spent in subsistence and creativity and in fact to incorporate his passion for Nature and the outdoors with the workings of the pen.

What thought was in his mind on that night, “the darkest evening of the year,” as he sat watching the snow fall? Was he tossing around the beginnings of a new poem as he watched the trees become top heavy with snow, contemplating the image of birches, and how, when loaded with ice, they bend, “like girls … that throw their hair before them over their heads to dry in the sun”? Or did he muse upon the idea that “promises” kept him from what he would really like to do if unfettered? Or did he simply celebrate, finally, the passing of the solstice, as I will in 22 days, knowing that more light each day means more time outdoors?

“The woods are lovely….” Thankfully, in these days of disappearing sunlight, the trees retain their statuesque beauty. Indeed, that beauty is only enhanced when draped with the diamonds of ice crystals or robed in a soft pelt of powder snow. I, too, have promises to keep, and will attend to them… after a walk in the woods. If only I had the horse and sleigh….