Providence and Pine Trees

The morning light of late November shoots through the windows like a laser, throwing itself past the interruptions of windows panes and blinds to leave a geometrically exact grid on the wall.  The pencil-filled mug-shaped shadow is a perfect silhouette. The glass in the frame on the wall glints with sun so bright I have to narrow my eyes to look.

Outside the window, on the narrow strip of field grass mown into a reasonable facsimile of yard, dew creates a mirror on each of the palm-sized sycamore leaves whose grips on narrow branches have been loosened by wind and gravity and, then, just as I begin wondering what the mirrors reflect, thin clouds gauze over the sun and the leaves became just leaves.

Something about the scene makes me remember that 34 years ago this week – the week of Thanksgiving – I moved my few pieces of furniture and far too many books into this house I named Sandhill, this house deliberately placed so that the morning sun comes through my bedroom windows, so that a breeze across open fields leaves rocking chairs on the front porch in near-perpetual motion, so that grazing deer and I can catch each others’ eyes.

I assumed it would always be so.

Another look out the window reminds me that even in nature, especially in nature, nothing remains the same.  Pine seedlings now occupy the dirt that once produced corn and peanuts, cotton and soybeans, Vidalia onions and winter wheat.  They need little tending and will not be harvested for many years, but they are already changing the landscape around Sandhill, at least in my imagination.  

Still short and years away from qualifying as actual trees, I can already see them, tall and dark and blocking out the back deck sunrises and the front porch sunsets that have kept me company for decades.  One day I will not be able to see rain clouds approaching from a distance.  At some undetermined moment in the future I will not be able to stand in the front yard and watch a bulbous moon magically appear on the horizon and float up into the sky.

Among the many lessons I have learned from my dirt road observatory, however, is that anticipatory grief is dangerous.  Mourning a sun that has not yet risen, a breeze that has not yet brushed my cheek is evidence that I am not paying attention to the sun, the breeze that is mine today.  It means that I am missing the beauty and the lessons in the new landscape developing around me.  It means that I have lost sight, if only for a moment, of the reality that I am capable of surviving and adapting to things I never wanted.

It was providential, I think, that it was at Thanksgiving that Sandhill became my home, my safe place, my inspiration.  Providential that in the light of thousands of sunrises, some of them obscured by clouds, I have learned how to find truth in small things, to trust the voice of my heart, to tell the stories that matter.  

How can I be anything but grateful?

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