Tree and Man

            A rough rock and dirt hill dropped to level a few steps behind the small cottage. From their bedroom windows, the woman and the man saw a steep hillside of weeds, better than looking at a neighbor’s wall certainly, but lacking beauty or refuge.

            The man saw lava soil, light and soft, burned heart of the earth, ash of earth, with random clumps of jagged lava rocks. A little at a time, he rearranged soil and rocks into terraces. He told his wife, “Planted terraces will give us a beautiful back yard. We can grow plants for beauty, plants for food. We’ll have a very pleasant place to sit in quiet contemplation beneath the sun, beneath the moon.”

            He told the juniper tree on the east and the juniper tree on the west, “Stay just like you are. I’ll work with you just like you are, no problem.”

            When he moved earth and rocks beneath the low hanging limb that grew from the eastern juniper tree, he stooped or knelt. That caused his back and shoulders to feel cramped, but that was okay. He liked working on his knees part of the time, moving soft soil and rocks. Some rocks, he dug from the burned yellow brown lava soil. Earth clung to them. Some rocks had been exposed to the weather for years. They were black, cleaned by rain and wind. Moss and lichens grew from some rocks. The man placed those rocks into his landscaping carefully, so the moss and lichen stayed in place and still grew. Grass sprouted from the soil he had moved. Lush grass grew dark green.

            Late that first summer of landscaping, the man and woman ate several small tomatoes that he started indoors, early spring. By the time they ate those first tomatoes, the hillside behind their house had become their yard, their garden, with only memories of the steep, ragged, weed-covered slope. Sometimes the man thought, that low hanging limb. Couple of times, he said, “That low-hanging limb.”

            She said, “Yeah. It was here first, though.” She was just repeating what he’d told her for three years, that’s all.

            One day, he said, “I read, trimming a tree could be good for the tree.”

            She looked at him a long time, like she might not understand. Then, understanding, at first she didn’t see her function in this process of home, yard, garden, and the eternal forest close around them. “Are you going to trim the tree?”

            “Sometimes I think about trimming it.”

            She resumed her reading. Shade from the juniper tree fell to her book, her face and hands.

            He had cut roots during his landscaping. Had to. They were there. The tree seemed as healthy as ever. He limited watering in the back yard, because juniper trees don’t like a lot of water.

            When their second summer’s tomatoes ripened, he cut the limb. One branch on a tree, probably good for the tree to trim that off, get rid of always running your head into that limb, pitch and foliage in your hair sometimes, that part of the garden. It took him a long time to cut the limb. Carpenter’s saw wasn’t the right tool, but once he started cutting the low-hanging, green limb, he stuck with it. He hacked at the limb, and the saw jumped out of the cut. He put it back, bore down on it, and the saw bent instead of cutting. He started over, pushed the saw slowly and carefully, but made very little progress. He could go buy a pruning saw, but he didn’t want to make a large and expensive project of it, so he dueled with the balky carpenter’s saw and cut the limb off the tree and into two pieces so he could move it easily.

            He sat in the garden through evening into the night, colder, and darker. Removing the limb opened his view of part of the sky. Longest time of sun on the garden, sun on food-producing soil he had in summer now was maybe three hours a day. Just sitting there looking at the east juniper, he saw cutting that tree out would give him twice as much sunshine. Six hours, maybe more into the garden. No more lugging planters to follow the sun that ripened tomatoes. Cutting the west juniper wouldn’t give him that much more sun, because the next hill stood behind that tree and ate the sun soon after the tree did. That side wouldn’t be worth it.

            She wouldn’t speak to him. He gestured helplessly and said, “People cut trees. People cut trees all the time. We can get probably more than three times as much food from the garden, because we’d have so much more sun.”

            She walked past him without looking at him. She walked into the cottage. He sat out in the garden and watched the full moon rise, golden autumn. When he went into the house, he was surprised she was still up. “Oh,” he said, “I should have come in sooner so you could relax. If I had known you’re up. I’m not going to cut it. We can buy a lot of our vegetables.”

            “We always have.”

            “I know. So I’ll leave it alone. I did make an agreement when I started landscaping out there. Tree was here first. It just got in my blood, I guess, when I cut that limb, and I wanted to keep going. I think I have a small insight now into how serial tree cutters totally lose all reference and get drawn in beyond their control, lust for that smooth feeling of power when the saw bites deep into wood and spits saw-shredded wood residue toward the ground.”

            She kissed him quickly and walked on by. “I’m glad you decided not to cut the tree down, but if you’re going to run around talking pornographic, I think you better go in the bathroom, just talk into the mirror. I don’t want any of it in here.”

            Moonlight shone in his window. Among his many dreams, he dreamed he cut the juniper tree down, cut the branches into pieces, then cut the trunk into firewood lengths. In his dream, he stood looking at the vivisected tree, and he didn’t remember cutting the tree into pieces. He remembered, he cut the tree down. It lay down quietly, because it fell onto its branches that bent gracefully and cushioned its fall.

            He didn’t remember cutting the branches off. He didn’t remember cutting the tree into lengths, but he stood here, chain saw idling, acrid smoke rising into his nose, and strewn over the side of the hill, a juniper tree cut into pieces. His muscles felt tired, as if he had swung the roaring saw this way and that, cut limbs, cut through the trunk again and again, reduced the tree to pieces, chunks of wood, lengths of branches. He felt tired muscles. He felt fear and a growing sense of isolation from everything alive.

            He woke. Moonlight shone in his window. Both juniper trees stood in moonlight. Both juniper trees shaded dark areas of the garden, rocks, plants, soil in shadow and moonlight. Beyond where the sprinkler reached, wild grasses had bleached pale yellow with autumn. Grass’s life force retreated subterraneous, abiding. Grass stems stood in tall, seeded clumps the soft color of autumn full moon past midnight.

            He woke and felt isolated, afraid, grief-stricken. He struggled to breathe. He spoke softly into moonlight flowing into his room, “A dream. A dream. That was only a dream.” He worked to relax and breathe smoothly as he watched the juniper trees stand in silent, soft, golden moonlight.

            A new song began deep in his mind and gave him words about winter approaching this land through golden autumn that lingered after harvest like an aging dancer, reluctant to leave the darkening stage. He would get up from his bed and write down everything flowing into his mind and sing out, lest words escape his waking memory with their minor keys and major sevenths moonlight melodies. He tried to shape his energies toward action, but he watched the moon and the juniper trees in moonlight, grass, golden in moonlight, rocks blending to soil in moonlight and shadow. His mind drifted in moonlight, enchanted by newly discovered, slowly developing pregnancy of meaning between life-bearing earth and him.