Some Lesson

I wonder what the lesson is I was meant to learn this delicious chill morning as I sat out in my yard looking up into the branches of the black cherry tree there and watched the sunlight steal down the branches. I thought of so many things. Of Monet and his painting of the trees at Cap Ferrat, the light of sunset giving them blazing golden bark. Of the light of sunrise or sunset reflected from Manhattan towers, as seen from the bridge.

I’ve lived twenty years with that tree and even now when the years seem to flee twenty years seem a very long time. Twenty years. 1982. The tree was not as tall as Paul then. The Puss was with us then with many years ahead of her. The yard was filled with sun. We grew tomatoes that the squirrels blissfully snacked on. I was working at ADT, in the World Trade Center. The internet hadn’t been heard of.

The bits of life I remember of that tree.

Now a tumble of birds in it and above it, decades of birds, a life of birds. A mourning dove calling softly. It was the mourning dove that called me downstairs at this odd hour, sunrise on a Wednesday. Blue jays with their brassy call. I remember them from Easters long ago. Seagulls flying high, the sun illuminating them. Crows black as night. The crows are new. They were not here when we came. One year there was a parrot. And now I see that all those voices come from one mockingbird. The mockingbirds are new too. They speak northeast bird, but they sing the south too, and the city, car alarms, ice cream trucks.

One year on Memorial Day John and Patrick came for dinner, which we ate under the tree, and a branch of it trailed over Patick’s shoulder. He picked a blossom, thinking it was a lilac, and handed it to me as if he were my champion. I think it may still be pressed in the pages of the Day Timer I was using then. How we mix yesterday with today… Later we drove them home, driving through a storm so fierce we had to stop because you couldn’t see. Lightening cleaving the sky over the bridge, reaching from heaven to the tips of the towers, God’s finger passing life to Adam.

In Mickey’s first year she climbed that tree and couldn’t figure out how to get down. I went up with a ladder to get her. Now she goes up and down with complete ease, catches a cicada and brings it to me as a gift. How cats seem to know when it’s good for them to be nearby!

One year the tree’s blaze of gold got me through my miserable fall of quitting smoking. No big deal? Ha. I had to learn to live all over again. It took a year to come around to things that felt familiar. I needed that sense of recognition somehow to feel normal, and nothing was the same as before until I went around a year and met a season for the second time.

A terrible sadness brought me here. I don’t know what it’s about. Last year at this time I was the happiest I’d ever been. I’d been happy for so long I almost believed it was the new way. Now, well. I pick up a cicada’s wing and it is a miniature Tiffany, all that’s left of Mickey’s gift.

I know there is a lesson here. For now I can’t quite grasp it.