They are gold, orange, red,
Amid the gray and black of
Tree trunks settling into
Imperceptibly rising ground
Left by glaciers.
We become part of
An elegant detritus,
Sweeping up with thin rakes
This year’s contribution to
Eternity.
This week I finished counting the trees in our woods. I could not have done it without the assistance of three residential gray squirrels who hopped grids in the snow, thereby facilitating the counting process. My purpose has been the identification and enumeration of trees for which I am responsible, so as to assist in their management. The deer were of no help whatsoever, walking around chewing on maple twigs and sticking always to the same path, without regard for a system. It appears there are seven hundred thirty-eight trees, plus bushes. Thirty-two per cent are red or black oak. Twenty-seven per cent are Norway pine, followed by eighteen per cent maple, nine per cent jack pine and seven per cent poplar. The remainder is made up of one to two per cent each chokecherry, pin cherry, white pine, serviceberry, hornbeam, black cherry and white spruce, the spruce concentrated near a small pond. A few ornamentals introduced near the house are included in the count. Someone came to our door a while back. She said the census showed there are two in our household, a male and a female and was this correct. Yes, I said, it is correct in a way, but I think you are selling this place short. There are hundreds of others here; I just haven’t finished counting them yet. Well, she said, when you do, let me know. She looked at me peculiarly, I thought, considering she was the one who had asked the question. I had imagined the census as seeking useful detail. She got back into her car, a dark blue 2007 Chevy Malibu LT with Wisconsin plates. It is the only one of its type I have seen in our area, where about thirty-eight per cent of all vehicles are Chevy’s, nearly half of them pick-ups or light vans, slightly less than nine per cent of the total being dark blue, the latter regarded by most observers as being invasives from Minnesota.
Just tying up loose ends, he said,
Visiting relatives
We haven’t seen in thirty years;
Changing the oil, washing windows,
Updating passwords,
Trying to leave the place
Better than we found it.
A hopeless task, really.
Even so, it feels better
To have
Drained the pipes,
Written the Christmas cards,
Stocked up on canned goods,
Programmed the remote,
Before we have to abandon this car
In an off ramp
Trying to get home
Before dark.
In the autumn of 2000, iron straps corseted the tower at Pisa to prevent its collapse at the middle. Huge lead weights straddled the north base; guy wires attached to the top story went off in three directions.
It was a smaller tower than I expected, a little squatter, but not less graceful. Even in its rehab suit, I liked it. Five weeks into retirement, conflicted feelings challenged my ongoing value as a person apart from work. I had announced my intention to become a writer, with little training and hardly a track record. My family wanted a more specific description of how my time would be spent. Travel and golf seemed short-lived, frivolous, escapist.
Restoration in process by the authorities, said the plywood signboard, involved extraction of cores of earth from beneath the foundation. Their plan aimed to prop the tower back up to its tilt of three hundred years ago, when the degree of lean was relatively static. At that point the supporting apparatus would be taken off.
Will it be like someone’s fractured limb, I wondered, from which cast and traction have been removed? Will it be thinner, weaker? Will it have to learn to lean all over again?
What if I turned out to be no good at writing? Maybe I had done the wrong thing, leaving the working world without a re-entry plan. If I failed to deliver on my promise that retirement would be a new career, what would my friends and family think? Was my estimation of success or failure going to match their expectations?
Had the tower never leaned, there would be no magic in it. People have watched it lean for centuries against thin air, perhaps sharing a secret hope of being there when it actually goes over.
I remembered a story about Galileo dropping weights from its top, measuring the speed of falling objects. From this he dropped the weights? Couldn’t he find something taller?
No, perhaps not then. Perhaps not even now, actually. Nothing in Pisa is very tall. And the tower does lean. Still, I had in mind a height matching its iconic status. I envisioned something like the Washington Monument, maybe. Now if that began to lean….
For me, standing there confused in an autumn afternoon, the tower demonstrated the value of persistence, of resolutely hanging on. It proved that being out of kilter does not necessarily mean you will go down completely, that people will still love you if you are a little crazy.
Should I have hung on longer at my job? Should I be comfortable with my decision, realize that others would feel good about it if I did, recognize that learning a new skill would not be different in retirement from before?
It is probably for the best that they will not pull it up to vertical. Its value as a tourist attraction would be nil straight up. It would need some practical use, maybe as a destination climb for tourists to view Pisa and the surrounding countryside. Entertaining, but not the same. Quirkless, like other towers.
We walked back to the station through narrow Pisa streets and found seats on the train to Florence. A little wait, then a gliding sensation, then a clacking of rails as the train picked up speed.
I took out my journal and began to write.
making coffee crows cawing outside morning dark beneath the floor of a torn-down shed honeycomb pond bottom a little breeze nothing