Some writing

Elegy for a Silk Tree


After his mother’s funeral was over and the few mourners had left, faces he couldn’t quite place in the fog, he sat on the cold stones and reminisced about the summer when he began to doubt the existence of things.


His childhood, to that point, had been about credulity. The back yard was the clay upon which he pressed his bits of belief. The yard was framed twice over, first by a graying cedar fence and then by junipers, winters gem, and English Holly. The rectangular center of the yard was made up of ambiguous brown grass cut through with clover and dandelion, which was occasionally cropped by the neighbor’s cadre of rabbits. The right side of the yard was dominated by a large white pine, branches lopped off so that the first available foot hold was well beyond his reach that rose spire like into the bright blue cathedral of the sky. That lack of a foothold, so precious to a child, led him away from the awesome pine and towards the old silk tree in the side yard. The tree was positioned just behind the gate on a small strip of land that was shaded almost year round by the junipers and winter gem. It stood about eight feet tall, sturdy and many limbed, its grey bark riddled by holes from some long dead woodpecker. The umbrella shaped canopy would carry pale pink blossoms come spring. He loved the tree with the sort of intensity that other children reserved for their dogs. He didn’t care for dogs.


He remembered spending evenings, the sky a purple bruise, a warm wind blowing from the west through the small valley town raising goose bumps on his bare arms, climbing into the welcoming arms of the silk tree, placing his foot at an intersection between two limbs that looked like nothing so much as an elbow. And he’d sit, for what seemed like days, with his spine pressed, not uncomfortably, against the tree’s reassuring trunk, his feet dangling in space, while mosquitoes and robins engaged in a deathly evening ballet. Beneath him bits of the foundation lay exposed, exhumed for a canal he’d built for his army men a summer ago. He’d used the larger rocks—dolostone, limestone, and brown chert—as mountains for the soldiers to climb over as they trudged wearily onward. In the distance other small birds, nuthatches and house sparrows, kept the evening full of song. They were average singers at best.