From Seed to Snag

I sleep on my parents’ dining room floor, between their sick rooms. And between trips to check on breathing and to empty vomit bowls, I find myself in that swirling state of half-sleep, with bits of memories fleeting into my mind and shifting together like a rotating kaleidoscope.

In one of these turnings, our recent four-generation Christmas tumbles into last summer’s walk in the woods. The Christmas people, in their sweaters and scarves, join me on that summer-day hike.

“There we are,” I say, with a wave to the woods.

We pass by seedlings, who poke their shoot leaves up through the soil. Already, they’ve anchored their first root underground and learned to take in sun and water. Bright with promise and tender in leaf and stem, they live at great risk, vulnerable to disease and grazing animals.

The saplings stand proudly tall, with barely a nod toward the seedlings who have so much to learn. Saplings feel their splendid vigor—the strengthening of their trunks, their quickly spreading branches and leaves and root systems. Their barks are smooth, without furrow, and their trunks still flexible enough to have some fun swaying in the wind. But they’re without flower, without fruit, without care.

Mature trees show the decades. They’re furrowed, shedding some bark, and bent by the wind. They’ve been gnawed on, climbed on, challenged by drought and flood and ice and burning sun. But above the younger trees, they form a sheltering canopy. And below ground their root systems hold soil in place. Most of all, they produce flowers and seed-holding fruit.

And then we stop, silent in front of a tree that’s been brought to its knees. It’s a snag, an ancient tree in its final stages, living beyond maturity, beyond its peers. Leafing still, though its canopy is shrunken and bowed, and its trunk hollowed out.

This ancient tree hosts life, so much life. Creatures live in its hollows. Plants grow from its composts. And saplings well-fed from the soil around it, stretch toward the sky where the canopy gaps.

The tree moans. And something shifts. It’s not the tree. It’s my dad in the next room on the couch. And I’m on the dining room floor, no longer peering through the eyehole of a kaleidoscope.