Writing My Grief, Day 16: The Condition of My Heart

I grew up in the suburbs, in a mid-century modern house just across the street from miles of conservation land. As a girl, I’d come home from school, have a cup of earl grey tea and a cookie with my mom, then take off across the fields and into the woods. It is amazing to me that my mother, who stands by her granddaughters every second, like a vigilant guard dog, let me run amok like this, but she must have. I was no rebel. I knew every tree in that forest, every bramble, and the depth, ankle, knee, or mid-thigh, of the swamp at every point I ever pegged my leg through too-thin ice and into the frigid muck.

There is evidence everywhere in my Massachusetts woods of a past life as farmland. Fieldstone walls stretch their heaped lines among the trees. Tractors and junk lie abandoned in thickets of blackberries. Trees wrap themselves around old posts.

It is fascinating to watch a tree eat a barbed wire fence. Here is the wire, stretching from rotted post to rotted post, and here is the tree, hardwood enveloping the sharp edges and taught wires like so much soft, yeasty dough.

Sometimes a wire wraps all the way around the tree pressing tight against each delicate capillary. That wire might strangle the tree, starving the top of the feast at its roots. But I’ve seen trees that survive, expanding right into and around the entire loop. Look up at the leafy branches swaying in the breeze. Only a belt scar tells the story of wire in its heartwood.

***

I close my eyes. I ask after my heart. I wait. At first, I wait with hands over eyes and see only blackness. Then I lift my hands and see the red of light filtering through tissue. Finally, I see the trunk of an oak tree wrapping itself around barbed wire.