Awakened From a Drowse by a Fallen Branch

"Chores, chores, chores.  Places to go, things to do.  Then occasionally I wake from my drowse and for a few minutes every toad becomes a dragon, every lilac is a fiery fountain, and I am walking on pure light."  (Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put:  Making a Home in a Restless World,  p. 137)

With the seeds assigned their imperceptible work in the greenhouse and the weather moderated and clear, we confronted the tangled thicket between the house and the road.  Driven in part by a desire to improve the appearance of the yard, and in part by a latent but resurfacing longing to fire up the power trimmer hibernating since autumn in the barn, we donned gloves, heavy clothes and safety glasses.  Without a shred of embarrassment, I retrieved the trimmer's owner's manual, reacquainted myself with the button and knob labels, perused the starting instructions, took a deep breath and pulled the rope.  A few times.  A cough.  A gasoline-laced sputter.  Ignition!  Strapping on the shoulder strap and palming the handle bars (this isn't, after all, some puny twine spinner) I proceeded into the sapling jungle like a gladiator into the coliseum, revving the engine every now and then as a kind of high combustion sneer.

The tri-point steel blade slashed and pruned and sawed and trimmed until, after what seemed like only minutes but proved to be more like an hour, the engine sputtered into silence; thirsty and out of gas.  I paused to survey the carnage.  To be sure, severed branches littered the area, waiting to be dragged out and piled.  We had, indeed, made a credible start.  What sobered me, however, was the slightness of the dent we had put in the task.  Surveying the still-impregnable regions beneath the trees I tried to imagine the number of subsequent afternoons far more intensive than this one that would surely be required to accomplish prideful results.  Chores, chores, chores strung together in infinite line.  Peering into the thorny fortress I half expected to see a gingerbread cottage and Hansel and Gretel's wicked witch interrupting her sweeping to crook her ugly finger beckoningly, menacingly in my direction. 

And then a broken branch caught my eye. The diameter of my leg, the long branch had broken off high up the trunk and rested now, horizontally, on the tops of lesser bushes well out of reach and fortressed by the dense thicket surrounding; the victim of winter's winds and storms.  Cradled there now, silent and stripped of its pride, it took on a kind of fascination.  My first thought was a kind of scorn -- "felled by a puny winter such as this one?"  But scorn quickly gave way to wonder.  This branch, I reflected, knows more of this place than I.  How long has it grown here?  What has it observed; what has it shaded?  What storms has it survived all these years, and what flaw -- what weakness -- caused it to succumb this particular year?  At first glance it appears a mighty and sturdy appendage, making its obvious vulnerability all the more surprising.  But isn't it more a wonder that any branch actually survives -- bent and laden and blown about?

I will yet need to hack my way in so that I can reach its lower extremities to pull and dislodge and, with any luck, extricate the woody corpse.  But leaving it for now, I offer an appreciative benediction for the stately life it has both witnessed and embodied...

...high above it all.