My family used to spend many long weekends in the summers and
falls at the Fritzsches’ cottage in Paw Paw, Michigan. My best friend James and
I would wander the dirt roads and sandy paths through forested back-forties for
entire mornings or afternoons at a time. Sometimes we’d stumble upon a field of
raspberry bushes and eat ourselves sick on them. Sometimes we’d walk the untold
miles into town to the one record store there, cool off in the AC, buy nothing,
and arrive back home at dusk. Sometimes we’d sharpen sticks with new knives, or launch empty
single-serve pudding cans into the air with Black Cat firecrackers. Sometimes
we’d swim ourselves to exhaustion in the lake until the sun went down, and ghostly
fires lit the shores, and we were more tired than we would admit, and the daddy
longlegs on the musty cinder blocks swayed in the twilight and the breeze in
our dimming eyes.
One autumn day, we spilled out from the wilds of an unharvested field to find ourselves below
a line of long, tall trees. The wind pushed and pulled us. The trees were tall,
and spiked with branches that launched themselves, ladder-like from the trunk.
Tree-climbing was a little boy’s game of chess, and these trees were easily
conquered. As boys will do, we picked the tallest tree. Up went James, then up
went Kevin. The climbing was easy, step over step: Not like climbing old oaks
or stingy maples. Foot over foot, arms around the trunk, up and up, faces
scratched bloody on bark. Sunlight bouncing and dancing among golden leaves; faith
in the strength of branches resting in the arches of smallish feet. Slowly,
voices begin to be lost in wind; and the trunk thins, and the branches with it;
and the treetop sways.
How high? 50, 60, 70 feet? The wind moves, and we move with
it. The tree yields, and we yield with it. I smile, clinging to the skinny
trunk. I am dizzy, and my stomach laughs inside me. The sun is beginning to
set. “I guess we should go,” James says. He is above me: First up into the
tree. But I am below, pioneer in the descent. I take a moment, and turn my face
outward, and gaze upon the world before me. Below us, a brown and glowing
patchwork of tended fieldwork; over my shoulder, the sunset resting upon the
lake. And all the world swaying, rocking in the wind, moving in a familiar rhythm. Thin lines of gold-sanded
roads widening to horizon. Combines resting, their drivers huddled near thin
lines of smoke trailing upward to our noses. Our fathers building fires, our mothers making a meal, our sisters telling stories. The coming night timeless: a
parade of hymns.
The wonder stays with me.
Years.
Decades.
Still.
And my right foot wanders, blindly, downward to find
purchase. And with this, we are on our way home.
