we play with falling... and rising... almost all of the really good toys do this... our great games demand it... tonight we revel in the rising and falling of colored lights... but the boom scares the bejeezus out of the cat who cowers under the bed... always... we are astonished by the falling and the rising and the boom... it is our own best motion... an apt metaphor for our deeply sown transcendental urges... rising and rising and rising... completed in the beautiful arc of the fall... and the fall...

this morning a storm came up quickly. dom and i walked a bit earlier than usual to beat the heat... then i jogged my mile on the track, but while stretching i noticed the general cloudiness concentrating to a dark darkness in the west... rushing closer quicker than the predicted afternoon storms... so i decided not to walk but to jog home and made it back just a minute before the lightning wind and rain... then it was over... and then dom called me from the laundry room... he said that the tree had just peeled away from itself... he saw it happen... and there it was half of our good old honey locust on the asphalt drive...

that's the view from my rain-spattered window... but i had to get closer...

up close and personal with the now horizontal lichen...

a fellow from the construction crew happened by and commiserated with our loss... "this gave a lot of shade... there was a fine little nest out on that branch... i been watching it..." and he plunged into the thicket... and found the empty nest... but it fell away beneath the leaves before i could get a shot...

well... dom made one phone call, and within the hour a crew was hard at it with chainsaws... earl and jose and miguel and...

in a few hours... actually four, from fall to finish... only the scarred old tree is left to tell the tale...

there sems to be a rusted metal rod that has been pounded through the tree... maybe thirty years ago... probably to lend support against an early crack... that has now come due... earl says the remainder will probably die because so much bark is exposed... he will cut it all down once the construction cabin is gone...

p. s. july 5: another big storm woke me at 5:20 this morning... wind like i hadn't seen since that hurricane in houston... more bad news for the locust tree... and a number of others... dom and i tried to walk the trail but we ran into a wall of fallen tree across the path... so we did the boring old dependable track... poor locust...

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

Boris Pasternak

 

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