Week 11Winter Week 11
Plant life, like all life, is the subject of constant revision.
—Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
The time for planting trees is fall. Planting after the heat of summer gives a young tree the chance to settle into its new surroundings before going dormant for winter, and fall rains help it to establish deeper roots that give it resilience when the blistering heat of summer returns. Things can still go wrong, of course—it’s hard not to worry about a tender sapling, bare and cold in winter—but a dormant tree, even a very young one, is mostly safe from hard freezes.
The problem is that these once-predictable patterns keep getting upended. It can be ninety degrees one winter day and drop below freezing that very night. The gentle rains of fall have become the torrential floods of winter. Paying attention to what is happening to the natural world can be a form of self-torment, and I sometimes wonder how much longer I can keep seeing the losses that surround me and not descend into a kind of despair that might as well be called madness. Some days I’m one headline away from becoming Lear, raging into the storm.
For thirty years I built my life: childhood, school, profession, marriage, the birth of my first child. Exactly thirty years. For Haywood and me, the time of caretaking, of providing for our children and for our aging parents, also lasted exactly thirty years. And now I have entered the last third of my life, if what we mean by last third is whatever happens after everything you were working toward has already happened.
My grandmother and great-grandmother each lived well into their nineties, as did both of Haywood’s grandmothers. Even my father-in-law, whom we lost only last year, survived to be almost ninety-three despite congestive heart failure and a pandemic that hit the elderly especially hard. I don’t expect to have thirty years left myself—I have lived long enough to see how unreliable good health can be, how easily it can be snatched away—but I persist in thinking that I have entered the last third of my life. I just put the emphasis on last and not on third.
I still have work that matters to me. I still have faraway places to see, a life to share with Haywood, perhaps grandchildren someday. All endings are also beginnings. This is what I tell myself again and again.
On a late winter day when the relentless rains let up for a bit, I drove to the park an hour before sunset to walk on the muddy trails. The woods were as lovely as they ever are after a rain: the creeks full of rushing water, the gray bark of the fallen trees slick with moss. Above the trail, the limbs of the living trees creaked in the rising wind, the kind of sound that makes your heart ache for reasons too far beyond words to explain. Too early, the forest understory was already greening up, but the eastern towhees scratching for insects in what was left of the fall leaves were not in any way sorry about the too-early arrival of spring.
As darkness began to gather in earnest, I turned to head back the way I’d come. A few hundred yards on, my eyes caught on a tree I hadn’t noticed when I was walking in the other direction. About seven feet up the trunk was a knothole, a place where a limb long ago broke off and let water in to rot the wood. Perhaps a woodpecker helped to deepen it, too, and gave the water more purchase over time. The hole was a grotto in the thickly grooved bark of the stalwart oak, a hiding place that reached far into the mass of that old tree. Who knows how many woodland creatures had crept into that crevice over the years to nest, to shelter from the wind and rain, to hide from predators, or to wait for prey?
But a creature lurking inside was not what singled this knothole out among the hundreds, even thousands, I passed in the park that day. What caught my eye was a cluster of chickweed seedlings colored the new green of springtime, so bright they seemed to glow. They were growing in the loam inside the knothole. Far above the ground, a hole made by decay in a living tree had become a cold frame, a natural greenhouse that let in light and kept out frost. Life in death in life.
On the way home I thought about that mundane miracle, that commonplace resurrection. Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.