Grandmama Oak

Good morning, Grandmama Oak! And what a lovely, misty, mild December morning it is. I wonder, did you feel those turkey toes scratching in the dirt before you felt my footsteps descending through the forest? 

I spooked the gang as I opened the east pasture gate at the edge of the woods. A dozen or more of them scooted off, and several opened their wings and stepped into flight where the hill sloped steeply beneath them on your north side. They’ve landed again, and I hear them moving far below us, their footsteps percussive in the crackling, leafy duff. If it were raining, I’d say they sound like water falling from trees; if it were windy, they could be the music of still-hanging leaves rustling on twigs.

I come here for the chance to be still. You are my mentor for that. I’m sure you are feeling this rare wet air moistening your dry limbs and seeping slowly into crevices against your trunk. It must be a welcome feeling in what has been a dry winter until now.

From my bench-seated view, I can see four very long, quite dead limbs among your many live ones. Still attached to your trunk, they are thick as my torso, thicker than most tree trunks in the forest surrounding you. One of them, if standing straight up, would be as tall as my house. The dead ones are small in number compared to your live limbs. But you had no dead limbs when I first met you nearly thirty years ago. Sometimes when I’m with you, I try to imagine you in your earlier life, before me, way back when you were at the start of your “growing up” years.

You sprouted two hundred years before I met you. And in my time here (as your dead limbs testify), you have crested over into the “growing down” part of your life, which could take two or three hundred more years. Since you are on our land, you’re safe from being cut down by a person, at least. For now. But other humans and less obvious foes may challenge you after I’m gone. I plead with the universe as I gaze at you: let Grandmama Oak have a full life, the rarest thing for any tree in the world today.

This morning’s fog shrouds you. The misty air rolls through the world behind you and blurs my view of the field far below us. Usually I can see all the way to the Birch trees lining the Pedlar River a quarter mile away. Up higher, though, I can just make out the shadowy ridge line of Tobacco Row miles away on the horizon.

I am aware, suddenly, of a stunning sense of proportion.

There is the short, short life of Louie the cat, who is purring on my lap. He followed me here, as is his habit, since I usually brush him as he sits on the bench with me. And then there’s my life, which is at least two-thirds complete now. Both seem immensely brief when measured against yours.

And then there’s the sheer mass of your body: part of which I see above ground and the other half or more underground, which I can barely imagine. I don’t have eyes to see through soil, have no idea how much space your roots inhabit, or what other roots are intertwined with yours, or how many miles and kinds of fungal mycelia are woven in as well. You are many-limbed and multiple-storied —actually and metaphorically, in size and through time. As I widen my eyes to take in as much of you as I can, I end up staring at your trunk and realizing how little I can know of your life, of any tree’s life.  You know more of my story than I’ll ever know of yours.

You are well acquainted with moss colonies carpeting your joints, mushrooms sprouting from your dying parts, and the myriad of other lives entwined with yours in the seen and unseen world. Which brings me again to the turkeys, to what their toes might feel like tickling the ground near your roots, to the wonder of how you are constantly in touch with so much of the living world—all at once, minute by minute, century by century. And to the fact that—for a shorter time, in a smaller but perhaps no less profound way—I am, too.