Roots

Right outside this lazy summer home. You ain’t got time to call your soul a critic no.

There’s a chicken sits outside my back window on a clutch of eggs. In the distance, a chair swing atop a bench, a pile of two by fours from a deck my dad built in Iowa and beyond to a mulberry tree knocked down by a hurricane called Ida. 

The rain stopped for a while, for two days to be exact. Before that, it may have rained everyday for a month. And before that, it didn’t rain for fifty or sixty days. 

It could have been my baby prayed for a bald man to wear a hat. Or maybe she knew she would find answers on a plane high above the United States. I wonder if she knows that trees bring the rain or how much her joy and her realizations make me smile. I wonder if she knows all the fruit that I have saved. 

I get to feed her guava for the first time on Saturday. A giant. Big as my hand. I will call this one France Fence and maybe another F for the street and specific spot where she was picked. Maybe a word that means giant or impressive or best yet. But I keep saying that, don’t I? The best one yet.

There were days at the school I taught when people would ask how I was doing. 

I would say, “It’s the greatest day of my life.”

People often asked why.

To which I would respond, “Because tomorrow has not come.”

There are multiple ways to look at sun and rain and heat and cold. 

The leaves of some of the plants look hot. The custard apple leaves, yellow in a pot, are a sweet shady green in the ground. Both in full sunlight. The latter a couple of years older. 

There is something about knowing that comes from observation. The leaves will fall when the heat becomes too much, but even in a pot most trees will survive by their roots, and even if all the leaves are lost, these stems will make more. Other leaves will drop when the winter comes and they will come back again. Many years ago I might have been filled with an oh-shit-my-plant-is-dying. 

Many years ago, I did not know God. I did not know love in a plane. I did not know about roots and how sometimes the strength resides in what cannot be seen. I had no way to explain God, but maybe, there is a comparison here. 

A root. Roots. God. Me. You. 

Sturdy and stable. The spot from which we reach for the sun. The spot that soaks up water and reaches deeper when there is no water to be found. 

The stretching throughout. What are called feeder roots. These run almost horizontally and into the feeder roots of other trees, and if there is a forest there is but one organism, breathing together and sending signals through these rooted connections, so that a tree in distress might be sent love, and if we are lucky enough, we can see this in the world around us. 

We can be this in the world around us. 

In the airport in Toronto. At a hotel in New Orleans. 

Right outside the back window where a chicken sits atop a clutch of eggs beside a bowl of water I gave her.