Behind my house there is barely a yard and it loses a little more of itself to the edge of the woods each season. Just into the woods, trees fall. Mostly it starts when limbs give way to wind, small ones at first, then later the girth of bodies, or the soft earth at the roots grinds down slowly, constantly, in the mortar and pestle of gravity and weather. But sometimes the whole body of an old hardwood gives and slants for a month or two before finally returning to earth, or a tree standing upright shudders and falls with a crash, and its suddenness shakes us, too.
After a short walk through those woods, the ground turns wet, then mucky, then to swamp, where a maze of cattails and thickets shelter tender bodies from the ravening: fawns and yearling deer and new rabbits tucked under the sweep of coyotes on hungry legs. Sometimes with the window open at night I can hear the drama and it tears back the thin cotton of my sleep. That's the thing about terror: even a rabbit sounds human when scared to death, its hold on life no less precious. Sometimes when I walk in the woods I find the signs of that struggle, both natural and brief.
After the swamp a cornfield and a small, freshwater lake. Then another. Or soybeans. Or pine trees. Or rivers. From the back of my house I can't see anything human as far as I look. The pattern of natural repeats, barely broken by the small towns with gas stations and pizza joints at the center, until 60 miles from where I stand behind my house, my mother shelters in her house, alone, away from all that is falling and all that devours.
This is a season of roots and rootlessness. More than I have in some time, I gather around me all the ways I am my mother's son. I feel the depth of my roots and the solid earth that feeds them. There is a constant love there. A bedrock. A place to always stand. Perhaps it is the comfort I need to live at the edge of this moment: like so many I shelter, hidden away from danger. Perhaps it is my fear: I know beyond doubt the rooted pathways of her lungs could not fight the virus well, if it should find her in its hunger.
This has been a rainy spring. It followed a rainy winter, which followed a rainy fall. I heard on the radio the other day that Michigan geologists have claimed the lakes are full. There is no place for the water to go. So wet, low places like the edge of my yard get wetter, and hardwood trees that have stood for generations fall when their roots give way. Rare. Unfortunate. But still the natural order of things and beyond my control.
60 miles away my mother busies herself with reading, learns to cook again, struggles with technology. I long for her, and would walk there if I could, 60 miles through wilderness I both know and have never known, to stand at the edge of her yard as the sun warms the day with its clean light again. There is a wild instinct that compels the return I see every spring in my natural place as salmon return, and robins, and geese, and I feel the same wild heart beat in me: I am animal, too. I would return.
And the green returns. And trees remember warmth and reach for life again. Across the forest behind my house, trees are budding. The deer move freely to feed on tender shoots. And this is what I know: what we give of ourselves is drawn back up into the roots of what we become. I am my mother's son, a body given to this earth to live here. I would stand here longer where my roots have taken hold, where I am safe, and be strong. For her. For me. For a season of growth that pushes us both into the earth that holds us still and steady, and always will, even as it urges us home.
