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Outside
my window lives an old and confused crabapple tree. It sheds its leaves in the
summer, and by August, it is bare. It’s an odd looking thing, coming out of my
front yard like the skeletal hand of a prehistoric monster. A crippled palm
hides, slyly, a withered thumb that curls at the base where a wrist should be
and isn’t. Four dark spider fingers, fifteen feet tall, their skins scaly and
their joints swollen, spread wide like the spines of a Chinese fan whose silk is
gone.
In
the winter, sky and light pour through these fingers like so much water. But in
the summer, when the Gothic vault of these suburban woods leaves us but a
nickel's worth of sun, the tree and I live, perennially, at dusk. The crabapple,
I suppose, takes this gloomy twilight as a sure sign of autumn. Its leaves turn
yellow in June, and by August, it’s a corpse.
When
I sit at my desk to write, I stare out at that hand. Sometimes for hours.
Nothing much is coming of the writing anyway. So why am I torturing myself? My
mind’s as barren and wooden as that calamity out there. I’m old. I should
have written long ago if that’s what I wanted to do, not put everything else
first—husband, children, house, garden, laundry, cooking, nursing, nurturing.
Can't make up for lost time and words not written. Can't force putting something
on these empty pages if there's nothing inside to put there.
A
handyman, hungry for work, rings my doorbell and asks if I need that tree taken
down.
He's
not the first. In the company of my neighbor’s manicured lawns, the tree
stands out like an aberration begging for deliverance. It's not done much this
summer but drop its meager fruit into the grass where the yellow jackets rage.
He could cut it, I imagine, right there beneath that withered thumb, and I could
plant a medallion of impatiens around it until the stump decays, or adorn the
wound with a pot of cosmos to make the neighbors happy. I shrug.
“I'm
not sure,” I say to the handyman. “I think I'll wait awhile. That tree might
come to something yet, might shape up, surprise us all.”
“Whatever
you say, ma'am, but that thing is deader'n a doornail.”
I
swear the old goat of a tree hears every word and smirks every time, because
each spring this old hand works the same miracle, and year after year I manage
to forget how miraculous that work. On a day when I pay scant attention, the
spider fingers start collecting hearts, the size of tear drops and ruby red.
When next I look, these hearts are strung all over that tree, on boughs and
twigs and over and under and back and forth until the hand is filled to the brim
with jewels, heart shaped and the color of aged Burgundy.
Some
unsuspecting morning, I walk out of my house, looking at my feet, thinking,
frowning. Something calls me without sound and I look up, startled. Where there
should be a tree there is a cloud—an immense cloud made entirely of blossoms,
tourmaline and perfect, ethereal and amazing. I stare at them, dumbstruck. Can't
help but smile at that joke of a tree that set out to prove something, old as it
is. I shake my head and get back to my desk where, once again, an empty page
waits in my typewriter. I seem to get some pleasure out of torturing myself by
way of white paper, and so I sit, chin in palm, and dream out at my transfigured
tree that seems to mock me. Slowly it starts dropping blossoms, one by one, a
petal at a time. Softly, they spiral downward on spring air and then lie in the
grass like rare pink pearls.
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(All stories Copyrighted ©1998 - 2004 by Ursula Maria Mandel)
Home Time in Pictures The Good American Short Stories Recipes Links Site Map For VMI
Copyright © June 2001 by Ursula Maria Mandel