April 20, 2005

Birch

It is only a matter of an inch or two below the surface before the land assumes, I assume, a radical new appearance. In so short a space, it becomes an entwined maze of roots and little varmint farmers laboring away the hours and days and seasons to make the crops all go or not. Some nourishing, some devouring, some just busting it all up for what may seem only like play. There’s not much there of the color and variety of the surface, but, I suppose that depends on one’s perspective.

The sodbusters don’t always stay underground. For example, such were the beautiful tiny inchy and wormy infants terrible feasting on a salad they’d made off the leaves of our new river birch. We could tell the tree wasn’t thriving, as the pediatricians sometimes say of the newborn. Its greenery was yellowisher than its neighbors. Its leaves lagged in comparison.

How the Indians made their sturdy canoes from the bark of the birch truly impresses me. But that they did is one important reason we wanted one of those trees in our yard. Though its bark is hardly adequate to make even a bathtub toy, yet there it is, peeling and wrapping in its lovely shades of brown and tan.

God utterly mystifies me just going about being God, so infinitely tolerant, such a wealth of humor there, smiling over whether we can tell if smoke is black or white or just gray and whatever on earth that has to do with a pope — the “Vicar of Christ,” such a title we’ve come up with, how presumptuously we use our freedom. I should think mayhaps God finds more pleasure in the river birch, and, I should hope, in our admiration of it. But what God sees in those abominable worms that dine on it… I’ve an eerie feeling we’ll have to be accountable for what we did to them. How presumptuously we use our freedom, indeed.

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