Windthrow

It’s around noon on Saturday. The game preserve is booming with people and the birds are going nuts over the enormous amount of bread scattered around the pond. Kids are running amuck in the sun, having a blast. But I’m not interested in that today. I’ve turned around. My back is to the pond and I’m looking at the tree line.

You are with your mom, down the street at a playground in South Park. You love the slides and the swings, almost as much as you love the ducks and the peacock named Kevin. The two of you will be stopping by shortly. I’m looking forward to it. But right now I’m watching a dead tree live.

It’s a small oak and it has seen better days. It has fallen and can’t get up (bad joke there). And only about twenty feet away, an even smaller evergreen has recently been broken in half. Mushrooms have started to grow on the downed trees. There are homes being built in there, a small city. I wonder how many animals have taken up beneath the rotting wood, no doubt hundreds and thousands of insects, probably a snake or two, maybe a muskrat burrowed in underneath.

From the other side of the windthrow (the downed trees), a whitetail deer is looking straight at me. She’s eating and watching at the same time, her ears and tail flickering. From behind, a mallard takes off and flies over the doe’s head straight toward me, but veers off and dives into the pond.

You and Mom pull up in the car. You jump out and run toward me. “Daddy, daddy!” Those words are music. The best kind. “Whatcha doing, Daddy?” I tell you that I’m looking at the dead tree over there. You say, “the dead tree over there?” like you understand what I’m talking about but you don’t understand why I’m talking about it, or why I’m doing it. And I think that’s a good question. Why am I staring at a dead tree? What’s the point? I begin to realize something. I guess, for now, at this point in my evolution as a writer, the tree is a frame, a ledge, something I can use to jump from, to get into what I really want to say. So what is it that I really want to say? I think about it for a some time while you walk the Preserve with Mom. The deer has since disappeared and I’ve forgotten what I hoped to find in the windthrown trees.

So I pack up my bag and I walk to the other side of the pond where you’re telling Mom about the ducks, or just showing Mom that ducks exist. You point and say, ”look, Mommy, ducks,” as though we don’t know that they’re ducks. But what else is there? I don’t think I know any more about ducks than you do. So I stare at them for a while. I stare at you still pointing to them and telling us what they are. I stare at Mom who smiles every time you tell her. And I smile too. We’ll be back here, I say to myself. We’ll be back here, often.