by Rachel Lawrence Godfrey
It is springtime here on Grace Island. Still gray and dreary, but the temperatures are warming and we had three days in a row with a break from the constant Pacific Northwest drizzle. The air smells different, crisp and fresh, and buds are coming up on the trees, fighting their way into existence. The lake is calm, its surface as flat as glass in contrast to the turbulent murkiness of just a week ago.
I sit alone on my deck and stare at the dead tree five houses down, as it leans precariously over the lake at a one-hundred-twenty-degree angle, creating an obtuse triangle with the ground. The tree is huge but barren, with four sad branches spread out along its one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high trunk and its tip has split into a Y as if it had been badly trimmed in its infancy. Not once in my ten years of staring, have I seen a leaf nor a semblance of a bud. Yet, something must be alive and strong at its core to keep it from rotting and toppling over and into the lake. In winter it blends in with the dead growth of the neighboring trees, but in spring and summer the tree stands out like a sore thumb with majestic friends. A family of bald eagles hunt from it, legally barring the owners from chopping it down. They litter the shoreline and docks with partial fish corpses, and all of us neighbors have learned to keep a watchful eye on our under-ten-pound pets.
My phone beeps and reminds me that it is time to get up and go for a ten-minute walk. Without the beeps, I think I would sit and stare all day, my brain running on six-month-old what-if fumes. What if I wasn’t late? What if I had cooked us a nice dinner at home instead of going out? What if I hadn’t worried about finances and brought up that sore topic? What if Daryl hadn’t drank that fourth drink? What if I had been brave enough that when Daryl had sneered, “Do you think I’m okay to drive? I think I’m fine to drive,” I would have been honest and faced the music, and answered, “No. I don’t think so.” But I wasn’t brave enough, and one cement divider later, I am a widow with a prosthetic leg, who needs phone beeps to remind her to get up and walk around.
Between the dead hunting tree and me, are five houses with an assortment of evergreens, as well as our own fig and plum trees. After we bought the house Daryl discovered his green thumb. For our first attempt we grew berries, tomatoes, and cucumbers in pots sitting happily in the sun by our front door. The two lone deer of the island found them and had the fruits and veggies for their dinner. The second year we moved the pots to the back yard and planted trees. Daryl loved figs, and I love plums. We each got our own tree. Daryl took care of them, watered them, talked to them, trimmed them, and fed them tree minerals. I ignored them till harvest time when I would pluck the lower branches bare before fetching the telescoping harvest pole and bending my back to the task until my back complained and I could barely get upright. While the figs all made it safely to the basket, I’d gorge myself on plums as I picked. One for me, three for the basket, one for me, three for the basket. Until I could no longer look at a plum.
Like Daryl on days without drink, the fig is as dependable as rain in winter or death and taxes, pick your metaphor. Two blooms every summer, each netting copious pounds of fruit. The plum could be temperamental like me, waxing hot and cold as the universe fed it good and bad weather while feeding me life’s joys and crap. Two years ago, we had so many plums that even after our twenty-four-year-old nephew took fifty-five pounds and turned them into plum brandy in his one-bedroom apartment, the tree looked fully clothed. We had made plum jam, and plum tarts, and left baggies of plums at neighboring doors. Last year the spring came early, followed by a late frost, and we had a grand total of ten plums, while the fig mocked us with its fecundity. Today I walk down the deck’s stairs and over to my plum tree as part of my doctor-insisted exercise and count the baby sprouts. I give up after two hundred. It will be an okay year, just not the thousands of two years ago. But the counting was cathartic and put me in a good mood, as I waddle back up the ten stairs to my deck and resume staring and what-ifing.
A pontoon boat goes by, filled beyond capacity with teenagers, their music playing too loud, and their laughter rolling out across the waves. It lodges within me. I wave at the boat as it drifts by and watch it glide under the dead tree. One of the kids points to the tip of the tree. It is early season yet, but I follow their gaze to the white head sitting on a brown body on the topmost branch. I run indoors as quickly as my leg allows for the binoculars I keep nearby just for this reason, and train them on the tree. There, majestic, sits the mommy or daddy bald eagle. The smile that lodged in me grows as I turn my eyes to the sky searching for the mate. This is why the tree still stands, towering naked over the lake and the waterfront bushes. Over the years I have stared at it, I have seen the eagle couple return with their offspring to hunt. Ten years ago, there were just the two eagles with a lone eaglet. Last year the family grew to six. I’ve spent countless spring and summer hours watching them glide over the lake, dive and come up with dinner. Minutes pass and one squawk follows another. Two adults join, then a third and a flutter of baby majestic wings. Seven. There are seven eagles sprouting on their tree like the figs and plums below me, and my fatherless twins inside me, waiting to be born.
Category: Featured, Fiction, SNHU Student