Pamela Jean Owens off-line

May 1, May Day around the world. A time to wear red, kiss a Commie for Christ, share the flowers in homemade baskets, and listen to the birds singing through open windows.

I worked and puttered on the ‘puter ’till, 2, slept like a baby, and am awake and at the keyboard only a few minutes after 9.
I’m beginning to think that, when serene, 7 or 7 1/2 hours sleep is my natural rhythm, plus a power doze sometime in the day, perhaps, but not a planned one.

I’ve woken up the upstairs, remade the day bed and opened the screen, sitting here contemplating the sight outside my window while the cpu wakes up, like my house is doing, like I’m doing, like the birds did hours ago.

And oh, the birds. I hear the caw caw caw of the crow or the grackel, today they drown out the peck peck peck of “my” woodpecker, I hear more other distinct calls and songs than I’ve been able to count, since I’ve yet to learn their language. But I will. This season, I am learning their calls, their sounds, because I want to know, really know, if they have found their mates, if their eggs have hatched, if the fledglings are safe, and when they fledge.

I listen to the tree that strains to caress my open window. Just another foot perhaps, a yard at most, and I could pull the leaves right inside the room. I realize it is the maple, the one in the west neighbor’s side yard; oh, my god, it is the same branch that I have prayed from my kitchen window that they would cut off.   The beautiful branch at my window is part of that nearly dead, surely dying tree, ill for who knows how many decades of its long long life.
The tree reaching for my bedroom window is the tree I think of as cancer ridden, full of the cankers on its lower trunk and outer branches that the Backyard Farmer on Nebraska Educational Television tells me means the tree isn’t going to make it and needs to be put down. This is the higher of the branches that in the winter, so dead and empty, sends huge portions of itself into my yard, onto my plants, trying to pull down my electricity as its cousin further toward the alley truly did in the dead of last winter.

Today the maple, for surely I must name it now, I can’t keep calling it “the tree” with such disdane, today this tree has reached out to me, as if in prayer. “See my green buds, only now for May Day, showing that their grown up color will be red, my newborn tiny red leaves replacing the buds at the ends of my branches.
“I am an old tree and I am much weathered. I live with cruel owners who abuse me and fail to care for me, fail to prune my broken branches and put salve on my oozing wounds. But I am Maple and I am majestic, and I have seen so much inside your windows where you now sit and look at me, contemplating my fate.
“Through your windows I have seen a woman’s pain, I have seen her crying into her pillow, I have seen her lashing out to beat down what is hurting her.
“Through your windows I have seen such love, such passion, such intimacy; I have seen babies conceived and babies born; I have seen an old woman gasping for her last breaths.
“I have stood here on guard at your windows since long before you were born, before your mother or father was born, even before all your grandparents were born.
“I saw the basement dug in 1895 for your home, and the kitchen built, and the bedroom above it.
“I have watched you move in, waited until today when you would see that I am your sentinel. I bring the birds closer to your window to wake you in the mornings.
“I am old, but I am Maple, and I still stand. I am red. I am Maple. It is May Day.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under My Story, This and That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.