Tre- e - e - e - e - e!

I recently ran across this picture that I first saw last year on FaceBook.  It filled me then and fills me now with delight.  It’s just so unexpected.  But it also delights me because it reminds me of one of the first times my grandson came and stayed with me when he was a big enough boy to stay by himself without Mommy or Daddy.

When we went outside to play, Rowen ran from tree to tree, pointed and shouted at the top of his lungs, Tre -e - e - e - e - e!, as if greeting a long-lost friend.  And then he began to hug them.  That’s right: my grandson’s a tree hugger, and I’m proud to say it.

But with the Derecho of Friday a week ago, we have been reminded that trees are not eternal, that they too are subject to a force more powerful, the force of wind:  that which can be measured and experienced, but not seen.

I’m one of the lucky ones: no tree took the life of anyone I know nor injured anything I am personally attached to.  If I were, I do not know how I would look at trees now, whether I would still see their beauty and grandeur or whether I would view them with suspicion and fear.

Looking west from my back yard

Mindful of the tremendous losses others have suffered, it is the trees that draw my attention now, ever-present as they are where I live.

I look to the trees and I imagine God not as some old man, but as a little boy in a garden of his own making, a garden where the winds have come through, leaving some of the trees standing while others lie impotently dying on their sides.  And I imagine this boy-child of a God greeting each one with the enthusiasm that only little boys on an adventure can show: enthusiastically joyful for those who live, enthusiastically sorrowful for those who die, each greeted as beloved friend, each fully embraced for the tree that it is.

Winds come and winds go.  Trees thrive and trees die.  God-treasures all.

When the Lights Go Out

My cousin Mark Taylor says this looks like a grazing dinosaur

I’ve lived through lots of losses of electricity – the mid-winter ice storm in West Virginia that left us without power for a week . . . intermittent losses of no more than a day throughout a lifetime . . . the more or less scheduled daily absence of electricity interspersed with inexplicable powerless days and weeks that is Iraq . . .and most recently, the storm of last Friday that swept the central eastern United States.

Jumble of home-run wiring in Baghdad

In Iraq, such an existence is a way of life, no more remarkable than that it’s hot in July – really hot.

But in the US, we have grown so accustomed to the ready and consistent availability of electricity to the point that its absence is more than an inconvenience: it’s a threat – or at least perceived as one.

But when the lights go out, some pretty amazing things, things that make even our fears seem small . . .

Outside, the evidence of Mother Nature’s handiwork is an awesome thing, reminding us of our relative smallness in the cosmos, up close and personal.  It’s one thing to stand before the ocean or the night sky and be reminded of the vastness and power of creation . . . it’s quite another to stand beside a hundred-year-old tree, impervious to we humans below, broken or uprooted by the force of wind, while its neighbor tree remains untouched.

Inside, to feel the heat unabated by the modern wonder of air conditioning is to stand with poorer brothers and sisters around the world as well as our ancestors, surviving without the cool comfort we so enjoy and take for granted.

Lights out at dark changes our daily rhythms away from our own artificial ways back to nature’s own harmonies . . . I like that rhythm better and find I don’t need a clock to tell me when it’s daylight.

And, of course, there’s the help of neighbors.  I still don’t know who took away the debris that landed on the church, including a branch that was so big it seemed in the random photo someone took (the only way I even knew it was there) to have been a tree sprawling across the front doors.  For that and so many other acts of overt and stealth kindness, I say thank you.

For Benny for getting and storing my frozen goods in their generator-run freezer during the outage . . . for Bev and Rich for watching my cat while I was gone, when they had so many other and more pressing concerns on their plate . . . for all the neighbors that checked on each other and did what they could to help . . . for the many, many, people who have traveled away from their own homes and families to walk into these woods carrying hundreds of pounds of gear to repair lines and poles and restore power . . . for Betsy, equally at home in the most chic of locales or boiling water from the river for her family . . . for a church that doesn’t need its pastor in town to tell them to take care of each other . . . for all the acts of grace seen and unseen, I am thankful.