The Wilderness Between

This is my favorite point in fall. The trees are bare. There’s something so beautiful about a naked tree.

As I walk toward my wild place, they wave their thin branches in their air like an inefficient basketball forward, trying to block the city from my sight. But since their limbs are bare, I can see right through them. So vulnerable, you can see their weakest points. You can snap off the little fingers on the branches, the little twigs. In the cold, the wood would give a satisfying snap.

Suddenly, the birds’ homes are visible, high in the trees, a clutter of smaller twigs and needles cradled by branches; a black spot against the grey sky. The birds have already moved on, but I can’t help but wonder if some will return to their childhood homes to start their own families. Finding their old nests a little smaller, a little less soft then they remember.

There’s something holy about the bare trees and their scrawny arms in the dead of winter. I remember the trees at Knox after a long sleet. The lamps along the paths seemed positioned just behind the branches, always just behind, and after sleet had fallen, the branches would shine with ice. The little fingers glistened in the light, looking more like complicated spider webs than tree branches.

The way the light circled from the lamp into the glittering limbs, it made a soft sort of halo. It was magical.

There’s nothing to distract me now from the trunk of the tree except for its limbs. I get a sort of pleasure from looking at the small collection of empty trees so close together. It’s as if a tree forgets itself with the blob of green around its top, but when all of that falls away, it remembers what it is. It remembers that it is thin, narrow, and delicate. They make a different sound now (though even dead leaves are still a noisy bunch when the wind comes calling). They are silent.

Sitting below the naked trees, I can’t help catching their new vulnerability. The sky seems bigger, grayer. The sky can see me now, and I can see it. We watch each other warily, but the trees only shrug.

I think too, there is pride in a tree’s nakedness. They stand straighter without the leaves. They flaunt their twists and broken limbs as well as their long, delicate fingers. They are unashamed of their scars. If I could wear mine so well, I would flaunt them too. I wonder how humanity would change if we, too, were forced to drop our leaves every year.

If, for half the year, we lived physically and emotionally bare. Would we sway and bend with the wind? Would we break under the heavy ice and snow? Could we really free ourselves, or, like a few of the trees by my stairs, would we cling to they ivy that covers and devours our flesh? Accepting anything that covers. Are we as brave as the trees?

No. I think we are made of more penetrable stuff. More tender, more delicate, more ego-driven stuff.