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Sixteen years ago, we met: a mature sweet gum tree shading the front of my new bungalow with rich green foliage. It had survived the city’s removal of a large limb, its wound long healed.
Months passed, before spotting a solitary yellow leaf laying on the grass, its stem dormant, announcing the change. I looked up. Still largely green, occasional bi-colored leaves hung on the branches. The surprise was unfurling like swirls of colorful cloths shown at auction: scarlets, lime greens, buttery yellows, and thievery browns.
For several weeks, the show continued until its demise: mounds of faded shriveled leaves strewn around the yard, later raked and bagged for the city’s yard waste pick-up. Stripped from my natural beauty, I grieved. It would be a long wait for its return.
As years passed, the sweet gum tree continued prospering, with more bags of gum balls lined at the curb for the city’s pick-up.
Then, the disruption began: 2021’s violent rain storms wrenched two large branches from the trunk leaving large swaths of exposed wood. Its woundedness remained with us until three weeks ago, when another large limb crashed to the street, with nothing precipitating this loss. The sweet gum tree was ailing and the arborist’s response was to take it down. A red cord, now circling the trunk, will enable the crew to identify it.
The analogy between the ailing sweet gum tree all that lives, including ourselves, is obvious, but our spirits continue on.
We wait for the inevitable.
Outside my study window, the morning sun casts patterns of pointed leaves upon those beneath them and prickle-shades the trunks of the summer snowflake viburnum. In one of the niches still broods the cardinal in her twiggy nest. It’s been days of stillness, at times, her feathered head moving from side to side with the regularity of an oscillator. With her, I watch and wait for new life.
Whoops! Something shakes one of the trunks, its intrusion feels violent. Among the leaves and spent blossoms, a gray squirrel flickers up the trunk toward the nest. Within the cover of more leaves blur two forms: the squirrel and the cardinal, jettisoned into the air and disappear—no evidence of their remains on the mulched mound beneath the shrub.
I wait for I know not what.
In the next moment, reappears the cardinal flying toward the shrub, until repositioning herself atop the nest. The quiet resumes.
The master builder’s red Mohawk twitched in the rain-winds, his dusky claws clinging to a branch of my summer snowflake viburnum, his short beak clinching a foot-long piece of flimsy twine. At least, that’s the perception of my visitor who provides materials for his mate to use; she knows how to build the 4 x 3” cup-shaped nest for their brood, over the next nine days.
The work continues, outside my study window. I’ve much to learn…
Heart Whisperings 