Up close beauty

It used to be a better view

Years ago, we bought a densely wooded lot in our town and built the home where we raised our children.  

I visited the site the day they cleared, and found the builder standing alone at the edge of the area, arms crossed, eyes scanning the terrain and the stumps and stray limbs that lay everywhere. 

"It's so violent," he said quietly.

He was right. There's no other word for it. When healthy trees come down, there's no other word for the sight and sound of it.

Eight years ago, we sold that home and moved to a smaller, secluded property in the woods.

I had to get used to it – the trees on all sides were right there and I felt crowded.  But because I am also a solitary person who loves privacy, I loved the tranquility inside my circle of trees. For eight years, I have done my most thoughtful work and found the easiest connection with my soul looking into those trees.

Our neighbor wants a better view.

Two Sundays ago, he dropped by.  "Hey," he said, getting out of his pickup, "Just want to let you know, we'll be clearing some trees. Actually," he chuckled, eyeing his property line, "a lot of trees."

We are on a hillside which rises behind us to a ridge where three houses sit in a row, all with views out to mountains far in the distance. In front, our property slopes to the street below. One neighbor behind us has cleared everything down to our property line to enhance his view, leaving us with a skimpy barrier of only a few trees. His neighbor, our Sunday visitor, would follow suit, clearing  straight down to the road below.   

He had a few acres - birches, hemlocks and oaks. They'd all go. And like our barrier disappeared behind us, so would our barrier to the right be thinned to almost nothing.

"Happy to take some of yours too, if you want, I'd be willing," said our neighbor.

Of course he would be. What's better than a better better view?

It began at once. From a bedroom window, I saw the glint of equipment through the branches, and felt the earth rumble with the vibration of treads. I heard the sound of saws and the whine of mammoth earth-clearing machines as they crawled up and over the hilly terrain.

It's hard to watch. Machines rumble through with extended arms that grasp the tree around the trunk like a brute seizing a victim's neck. Then, they yank, and finally rip the compromised tree from its roots.  When those trees are first torn from their place, a disturbing moment follows when the jaws of the equipment shake them free of any remaining connection to the earth.

Four days later, a forest was gone, and a fence of spindly survivor-trees stood swaying alone.  

It's his property, of course. It's his right.  

Little can be done to thwart the will of such people once they have the money and opportunity along with the legal right to do as they see fit. But there is only one kind of reasoning that grips people who remove real beauty to look at the picture of it, too far away to be real or flawed, and it is: because they feel like it.

It's so violent.

Dad in the armoire

Dad? Are you in there?
It's me, Susan.

Last week, I sat on my bed staring at a moss green fleece in my sweater closet, deep in thought about a book I've been writing since I was, let's say, much younger.

It's unfinished. It may stay unfinished because I feel about this book like I do about Burger King whoppers. I remember when I loved them but can't imagine wanting one now, and I can imagine anything.

And just like that, my dad's voice was in my head: 

What could you have done while you were finishing a story you don't care about? 

I wrote this down. It was mantra-quality.

"Is there more?" I asked this armoire-dad

There was a lot more, and I wrote that down, too. And I'll tell you what, it was like I was hearing the words of the Man Upstairs himself, instead of  his new friend, my dad.

Now. Does that mean I sit on my bed and open my armoire when I need advice?  

Yes, it does.  I've been back a few times.

Decide if you're trying to understand someone or make them understand you.  

---green cardigan-dad

Your words are a gift. Don't make them weapons.

---shell pink tank and cardigan-dad

Honesty and kindness are more important to you than having the last word.

---wheat v-neck-dad

Most opportunities to be suspicious are the same opportunities to trust. Choose trust.

---black v-neck-dad

Two things have to happen before you believe your closet is talking to you. First, you must be contemplative, reflective, and meditative. Second, you must have lost, and miss badly, a person who knew you so well, you'd never try to conceal an important emotion because he or she would detect it and describe it for you, and share a similar feeling that they had once.

That kind of missing won't kill you, but something of your missed one must remain in your life, maybe in the form of conversations with someone who knew your missed one as well as you did, or, if possible, your raspberry summer cardigan.   

It's become my belief that wherever we were when we allowed insight to settle the soul - the parking lot at Rite Aid, the bend in the road near my mailbox - or allowed a revelation to overwrite old ways of thinking - near exit two on route 89, looking at my neighbor's house from my kitchen window - we will expect more of the same on returning and probably get it.

Because expectation is half of receiving.

---Susan Bonifant.

Some people go to the ocean. Some go to their fireplace. And, some go to their furniture.

May no one ever be helpful enough to suggest to me that it is not my missed one I'm finding there, but my own counsel; that it isn't a kind of peace I'm left with, but a state of attunement to the deepest depths of grief,  that my moss fleece is just a moss fleece.

                                                                                                                              

Conversations with my armoire-dad will never be like the lunches we used to stretch into two hour dates. But if I can't anymore say to his tilted, interested face, "Here's something I'm trying to figure out,"  I can pick a spot – or sleeve – to focus on, and before long my deepest issue, worry, or concern will wiggle its way to the front of my mind.

You've been taking your own advice and asking me to help you trust it. I was only holding your coat.

---burgundy tunic-dad

A couple of weeks ago, I struggled with my own judgment about something and was trying to decide how to respond, and noticed that while trying to be more candid I was only beginning to feel pious. There was no good response, any comment I might have made would have been superfluous. 

Don't act on anything while you don't like the way you are seeing yourself

--- new pullover which is some color between brown and charcoal and doesn't go with any of my shoes-dad

In the five months that have passed since I lost my dad, I've been feeling drawn to a "next book" which could be a new way of thinking or a new way of life. It's not something I'm building. It's a thing that is there and waiting for me to find it. 

Like Dad in the armoire.

It's already happening. I've made some small decisions about new things I need or old things I no longer want, and one big one to return to school in the fall and finish my degree work.  Go Wildcats.

It's counter-intuitive but healing, this time of personal retooling that has followed the loss of a go-to who kept me grounded.  It feels like I've taken off tight shoes to think about rewriting the decades ahead. 

But.

Regret is worse than guilt and nothing is sadder than the words "I should have."  

---gray sweater jacket-dad