On a June evening I’m sitting on the back deck after dinner underneath the bittersweet arbor. I feel as if I’m peering out from a green tent.
First I see a crow that lands on the telephone pole. Each time it caws, it puffs out its wings, a proud dramaturge dressed in a tuxedo on opening night.
I look at the little apple tree in the back yard. About fifteen feet high, it already has cherry-sized green apples on it, like Christmas decorations.
The tree offers what is revealed: its trunk, branches, leaves and fruit; and what is hidden: its root system – a world whose image only exists (for me, at this moment) in the imagination.
I stare at the little tree full of spring-green leaves, and I see its beauty, its glow. The way the apple branches twist and spiral out from the trunk, its fullness, its wholeness, its completeness. The way it reaches.
This contemplation fills me with a bittersweet feeling, for I can never quite fully describe how its branches and leaves move somehow together at the slightest breeze.