Gravity's Embrace

“Let’s get some exercise.”  I used to hate when people said that to me.  My younger one is no different.  “No.  Shopping is not exercise.”  It’s already getting dark, like some winter city in Scandinavia as we back out the driveway at 3:00PM and head off towards Vassar Farms.

I can’t remember the way, until I start down the road and then it is all rather obvious, like some yarn pulled on from a dream. Take this right and run down the incline past the pond, that once had painted turtles but is now quite frozen over and pull up to the barn where we park the car.  I’d forgotten there was a football field.  Two white goal posts are out of time, in the field. 

The woods are black.  Blacker still across the white field, beneath the grey sky.  The vines that grew unceasingly during the summer, dashing up the trees to command the canopy sag now, leafless like a net over the deciduous hill.  My daughter calls it properly as “Mirkwood.”  After tossing a few snowballs we get into the pace of the walk and soon were at the wood’s edge where an enormous tick, the size of a poodle is portrayed on a sign, warning all passers of the dreaded mite. I consider the map of the eastern continental divide.  There are deer ticks everywhere.  But for some reason they seem to like lower New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Up ahead is an enormous old oak.  All her branches pull to one side and then, lately for perhaps the last decade or two of growth they all arch upward as if to compensate for gravity’s embrace that is pulling the tree off to one side.  Something must have happened to this giant on her western face.  We get closer and there is an entire tree’s worth of timber that has been cut from this hardwood cetacean.  These cuts are fresh and though the carnage is notable, it all seems to have been done in an effort to save the tree.  Was it lighting or rot or just the clean up of nature’s work?   I walk amidst the logs and benches but my daughter won’t approach.  She senses danger.  I tell her that this tree was growing strong when George Washington was president.

There is a low roof of clouds that extends all the way down towards the hills near Beacon.  To the right there is a break, held open, from behind another; further wall of clouds and the sun makes its way through this, as it descends.  Orange in the center and then, like the ROY G BIV of the spectrum there are cloud moods which smear off towards a waning violet.  When all is black and white any color noteworthy.  Garlands of red berries drape down from this tree and draw me towards them.  Some bird surely must adore these berries with so little else to forage for.  Ingenious they’ll be taken, flown for miles and scattered in blankets of fertilizer, on some other field.

“We turn around when we get to the furthest tree”  “That one up on the mountains?”  “No!  That one there, the fat one in the road.”  “Let’s go to the next one.  From there we can look down that bluff.”  “OK.  But there we turn back.”  I know there is another trail that leads back from somewhere up ahead. If it is visible from there I know that I will ask if we can take it back, even though I’ve just committed to a proper volte-face.  But there is no other path down from the bluff where the final tree stands.  And we turn around and make our way back the way we came.