More Trees

morning sit.

woke up to the saws this morning. watched from our bedroom window as the birch that holds the bohemian and cedar waxwings every spring fell to the ground. went out with the boy and gave tobacco to the few trees remaining to be cut beside our house, thanking them for giving up their lives and their places on the earth so that our brother and sister can make their home and road. sat at my sit spot with the little boy and watched.

the pine that the fox slept under was already down, and the tall, dead pine that little red squirrel perched his apple on, eating it now and then on that low branch, was already down. i watched as they made their way towards our grandmother pine, the great big one who gave me an owl pellet when i first moved here and showed me that there is wildness all around. the one that the doves sleep in. the one that holds wildness about her, with trees and bushes growing all around her, the most inaccessible place in our yard for humans, so one of the most valuable places for the birds. they cut away, with quick, efficient swipes of the chainsaw, her lower, dead branches - the ones that make it so difficult to get up close to her trunk to touch her. they sawed off a thin trunk on one side. then the man spent some time working away at her trunk - the saw just buzzed and buzzed, and i knew he was sawing through her middle. his partner, working the machine that drags the trees away, came over after a few minutes, angled the tractor straight toward her trunk, and drove into her. her whole body, all of her massive trunks pointing up to the sky, all of her lovely branches open wide toward the sun - the ones that i wrote about back when i was first starting to sit, the explosion of life that they seemed to be - all of her just tipped slowly to the side, falling, falling, until she landed on the earth. the moment she fell, the man drove the tractor, chains rattling and struggling, up her trunks and onto the top of her. i couldn't see what he was accomplishing - perhaps cracking her trunks apart with the weight of the tractor - but it seemed such an insult, this beast of a machine to be scrambling up onto her body, with not even a moment of respect.

they continued on down toward the road, taking down saplings, tall pines, everything, everything. they cut down the little apple down by the road, and last was the pine with the chickadees' favorite branches for seed-cracking, the one that held our bird feeders.

the lumber truck made three runs today, stacked high with the bare bodies of the trees. on the second run, the trunks were all brown but for the long white trunk of the waxwings' birch, piled on the side closest to us. this is where our lumber comes from. this is how the wood for our hardwood floors, the studs in our walls, the casings around our windows was treated. we live in a shelter built of this cruelty, this disrespect. like prine: "they tortured the timber and stripped all the land. they dug for their coal 'till the land was forsaken, then they wrote it all down as 'the progress of man.'" we cry for the trees, but then we build houses of them, buy lumber without a second thought. i look at the little maple table beside me - how many trees are in it? how many birds perched in those trees? how many little plants depended on the ecosystem under those trees? how many squirrels included them in their arboreal highways? how many deer peered past them in the forest?

the land looks like a wasteland. so much character torn away. so many stories and histories obliterated. generations of plants and creatures who've found their homes on this land, destroyed or sent elsewhere, to make room for a road and a house.

it makes me reflect on natives watching the rainforests getting destroyed, people watching hopelessly as the basis of their cultures and livelihoods, the land they love, is altered forever. i know that people on the earth have lost far more than i did yesterday and today. i've only lived on this land for two and a half years, and my people are not from this land. how do people survive when it's their ancestral lands that are destroyed? how do native people continue on as their prayer grounds are desecrated, their people's gravesites looted or plowed under by developments? how do people in iraq, tibet, afghanistan keep going when their cultures and societies - the most fundamental things in life - are threatened? how do humans survive such horrors?

we planted a peach tree today with our son's placenta beneath it, a little prayer and thanksgiving to the earth. and yesterday i put our new little cherry tree in the ground, just three feet tall.

our first daffodils bloomed today, and the forsythia is in flower.

tonight, the peepers and other frogs call in neighbors' yards, asserting their place, their continuation on this land.