Memorial for a tree

A tree ended its life on my property yesterday.  

A magnificent, soaring Water Oak --- it looked in prime health.   It was 70 years old – three score and ten.  Home, shelter, and playground to generations of birds and squirrels.  Pileated wood peckers raised their young in an old hole high up near a fork in the tree. Nuthatches climbed, sometimes upside-down along the bark, foraging for insects. Bluebirds and hummingbirds swooped up to rest on its generous limbs.  Squirrels raced round and round the wide trunk in pursuit of a tail.   My friend masked the road and the house opposite, hid the ugly black strings of utility wires. It shaded a garden of azalea, a bank of blue hydrangeas and our spacious screen porch.  On summer afternoons I would lie private and shaded on the couch in the screen porch and watch birds fly back and forth to the feeder.

I can barely stand the sound of the electric saws today.    The whine and buzz saddens and irritates me through the closed windows, over the music I play in futile defense.  If I were outside, I would smell the raw severed flesh of the tree, feel the empty space stretching above like an ache.

I came home at midday yesterday.  It was a hot, calm day.  No wind, no rain. Perfectly still.  Lying on the lawn, its furthest leafy branches scrunched up against the screens of the porch was a third of this giant tree.  Huge limbs had torn off 20 feet above the ground and crashed down while, unaware, I was shopping for groceries.  

The garden seemed to hold its breath.  I walked around the standing trunk in the silent heat.  I looked up at the remaining branches, huge and leafy, stretching out over the lawn.  It was so lopsided now, this old giant.  I turned towards the house thinking that I would ask the tree service to prune the remaining branches to reduce the one -sided strain on the trunk. 

As I walked out of the shade of the tree I heard the crack, harsh and sharp.  And then a monstrous tearing and ripping.

 I ran. I sprinted away.  I didn’t turn til I reached the side of the house.  Behind me the sound was long and loud and fearsome.  A scream of demise. Neighbors heard it over closed windows and  air conditioning on a ninety degree day.  I barely heard my own scream. 

Almost the entire rest of the tree came tumbling down, crashing against the ground, reverberating.  I turned to see the bounce of branch on earth, the shiver of leaves beyond my reach.  

I could feel the matching crash of my heart against ribs, the shiver of a near miss. The reverberation and finality of loss.

 

Got your wires crossed?

No longer my shady porch

In the Clouds

 " I've been so aware of the sky ", said Nancy

"The sky here is part of the geography,"  I replied.

I told her that the same was true in Kenya  Often it seemed that the sky extended and curved beyond the horizon such that you felt you could actually sense the curve of the earth. That arc of sky -- ever present, vast, encompassing, changing, dramatic -- part of the geography.

I spend a lot of time looking at the sky when I am in Africa.   I watch  how thunderheads build and tower upward.  I try to be outdoors at sunset -- a lady-in-waiting for an exuberance of color, a wash of wonder. I keep track of the phases of the moon.

On still nights I search the tossed rash of the Milky Way and anchor myself with the Southern Cross, try to find Scorpio.  When I was a child we would stretch out on our lawn, close to my father.  He pointed out the stars, named the constellations learned as a young man serving in the Navy, surviving the boredom and horror of war. 

Back in Durham, North Carolina, huge trees in my garden block much of the sky. Occasionally I'll catch a glimpse of sunset-reddened clouds or perhaps a swollen moon between branches. It will be like a treat, a small sweet sip of surprise  -- nothing like the full-on heady presence of the skies I photograph in Africa.

still quite far from our car --by this point we were running

mini rain falls from each cloud

The sky's the limit.   

Perhaps not.  Perhaps, in its variety, it is limitless

Fire

The news recently has been dominated by the massive wildfires in Arizona,  the dire floods in the Midwest.  I look at the images, humbled (yet again) by the power of the elements.  Humbled, and inspired also, by the way so many people pick themselves up after such disasters and press on to recreate their lives.

Nature does too .... regenerate, press on. 

I was reminded of this in South Africa when the Helderberg Mountain which rises behind my house caught fire early one Saturday morning in April.  The winds were dragon fierce.  The natural fynbos tinder dry.  The helicopters hauling seawater stood no chance.  The fire claimed much of the mountain range -- racing through the kloofs and over the ridges of the Nature Reserve,  and then beyond -- across vineyards, flaring in thatched roofs, leaving charred skeletons of dwellings at the edge of Somerset West.

Here are some photos of the Helderberg Nature Reserve before the fire. 

My husband, Graham and daughter, Julia walking in the Reserve

Protea in the Reserve

King Protea

Looking from the Reserve towards False Bay. Various Fynbos in the foreground

View of the Helderberg from the other side. Vineyards at its base.

And then came the fire. My walking group from Helderberg Village set off into the Reserve almost a month later to view the devastation, to note the signs of regeneration.

The fire bored right down in this trunk

This slope would have been  covered in fynbos

Protea.  The seeds remain dormant until fire triggers germination

The green in the photo above is masses of Watsonia plants emerging from the charred slopes.   All this in less than a month!! Fire stimulates Watsonia flowering and seed production. 

Next spring this will be an incredible sight.

In the Pink

 These  photos were taken a couple of  years ago after a small fire burned one section 

of a slope.  Next spring the entire mountain side will look like this!!!!

After devastation, hope springs eternal.