Dutch Roth Up A Tree

An Average Age for a Tree

A man I knew, wanting to understand how it felt to be a waterfall, climbed over granite and held himself where spring melt spilled over rock and crashed into a pool below. He must’ve been strong to hold on for so long, I thought as a boy. Now, I think it’s strange he imagined the waterfall as only its verge, gravity’s pull but never its crash. A waterfall is as much rain against pine and the meander downstream as it is the cascade. He held on simply for the feel of gravity on his body. Though that’s no small thing. 

It’s all in the descent. My brother wanted to be a pilot. Instead, he grew up and bought a glider. That freedom, he said, was what birds knew by nature. Dragged up and cut loose to turn graceful arcs in a sky silent save the breath of a whole planet holding him up. 

I wonder if he knew more than soaring. A bird delights in air, but did my brother know its caches in pine bark? Know the voice calling from the thicket? The warmth of the nest the same as flight? To say nothing of the leaping. 

I wanted to know what it felt like to last. 

We spent summers at our grandparents’ where a persimmon grew. To come to the house from the road, you passed its white blossoms. My grandmother planted it when she was as young as I was then, and from the bedroom I shared with my brother, I watched the tree, jealous it had seen so many years. 

Now I know three generations is not so many. Before we sold the farm, there were three Junes without blossoms and the limbs lost their limber. An eighty-five-year-old tree is nothing. Some live for hundreds, but these are remote gods. Not familiar like a persimmon at the road’s edge. 

When evening comes where I’m living, I watch the maple and redbud turn silhouette against darkening blue and wonder what it is like to stand rooted, toes in the soil and arms lifted holy to the stars. To do this even when the descent is all.