Fall Equinox 2012

Fall Equinox 2012 - a reading (on YouTube)

Fe-fi-fo-fum. Frost kills the giant and down he comes.

When we bought this house just over twenty years ago, the real estate listing said it sat on a well-treed lot. When I first stood on the back porch and heard the wind whispering through the pines, I knew it would be our home. The voice of the Green Man calling.

Since then, we’ve sacrificed to that sylvan spirit by planting even more trees, though you wouldn’t think there was room. I remember being told how patient we were, how many people could never wait for trees to grow so never planted any. It’s just something we do, if not for ourselves, for the next people who come along. The Green Man smiled upon us. The survivors include six oaks, two pines, two maples, two crepe myrtles and a spruce.

Until two weeks ago we would have numbered a ficus tree among them. At its prime it soared twenty to thirty feet above the rooftop of house. We had planted it the year we moved in, a houseplant we’d set free. As free as a tree can be. Seventeen years later, it repaid us in shade every afternoon. Its bower provided refuge for squirrels and birds. Its boughs even sheltered the occasional sick raccoon.

On a long winter night two and a half years ago, a rare hard freeze descended from the north. Within days the ficus had dropped all its leaves, some twenty bags full stacked at the curb. That spring, we called in a tree service to trim it back to live wood. The arborist was encouraged it would survive. Though it no longer soared as a statuesque giant, we weren’t too worried. As a sapling, this tree had survived a similar freeze, one that had claimed its companion along the fence. That summer, we saw the Green Man’s spirit still lingered as a balanced course of bright green leaves emerged.

The next winter, Jack Frost again came calling, this time accompanied by the chorus of a stiff north wind. Once again, the ficus dropped all its leaves, barely a dozen bags this time. That spring and summer, it struggled to renew. What new growth sprouted came in much farther down the branches almost exclusively on the sheltered sides. The rest remained as barren as a skeletal oak at Samhain.

That summer, a woodpecker began hollowing a nest in one of the high, thick, dead branches. He or his kin had lost their previous nesting ground when a small deadwood tree at the top of the street finally collapsed and was removed. Unfortunately, the nest remained empty as his handiwork never attracted a mate. As the summer rains settled in, bark began to peel away. Colorful, intricate fungi began to grow along the branches and in the hollows. Midday sun once again caressed almost the entire backyard. Grass that had thinned in the ficus’s shadow wove itself back into a thick, green carpet.

Last winter, no fresh freezes fell upon us. New growth returned though in a deeply lopsided fashion. Ropes of live wood threaded their way around the dead using old, gray branches as support to reach back to the sky. Another, smaller variety of woodpecker bored a nest in a different branch and raised a clutch that sought out their own place in the world come spring. The majority of branches remained barren and denuded. In a late spring storm, one came crashing down on the park side of the fence without damage. That should have been a warning yet we did not heed.

We had intended to cut the ficus back again before summer. We had hoped to balance it and remove the bulk of the deadwood before hurricane season blew in. That was not to be. Our spring was consumed with unplanned travel centered on my mother’s life and my father’s death, quickly followed by my stepmother’s. When we finally returned home, we crossed our fingers, putting off that like many other chores until the fall.

This summer, the rains descended in force, thirty-one inches total, a full nine above average. Most of that fell in five or six inch deluges, with two multi-day inundations spun from tropical storms lingering in the Gulf.

The surviving greenery filled in and thrived. The back porch returned to shade each day by mid-afternoon. The first woodpecker returned to his construction, continuing to make improvements in hopes of catching some female’s approving glance. More bark peeled, more fungus grew. We eyed the deadwood in calculation to be sure that if any more came down it, none of it would clip the porch. By the time we left for Atlanta on Labor Day weekend, we were hopeful our ficus had survived the worst.

A week later, on a Sunday after dinner, the remaining twenty feet of that green hope came crashing down. The Green Man attended its fall, ensuring it landed in the only place it could without damaging anything, missing the porch, the birdbath, the power line supports, the statue marking the grave of one of our cats. It clipped the juniper we had once used as a Christmas tree but only bent it over.

Within days we had another tree service out to cart away the body. Two days later, it was gone. The Green Man must have watched over its final passing. One of the last two remaining branches the tree service dropped came within a foot of our roof. The other did a half-gainer over the chainlink fence without bending the support bar. The wood was too rotted to be predictable. The central stump, between two and three feet across, is an amazing pattern of individual six inch stalks from the original houseplant fused together over time. We will wait until next spring to get it ground to see if an ember of the phoenix lurks within.

We spent the next Saturday afternoon planting a crepe myrtle to honor my father’s and stepmother’s memory. I think she especially would be pleased by the new myrtle’s dark pink flowers. We plan to trim it up to be more tree than bush. One day, we hope this myrtle will shade the back porch like its lavender flowered cousin in the courtyard. Perhaps one day, it too will brighten our lives with fluttering, deep pink rain.

I will miss the ficus but will not mourn it. Death is just the balance of a natural cycle. Even fallen, none of its leaves had even begun to wilt. The only sad part to me is that had it lived in its natural habitat, it might have re-rooted with stringers, or provided a rich environment for a new life to take seed. Its end, while painful, opens space for something new to grow. I see that as a metaphor for most loss in this life.

The equinox is a time of balance between light and darkness, a twilight buffer between the summerlands and the land of the sleeping dead. In autumn, the Green Man dons a brightly colored mask, reminding us to celebrate not to mourn. We will see these souls again if only in different guises.

Fe-fi-fo-fum. Frost kills the giant and down he comes. Be he live or be he dead, may he rise again to shade our bed.

© 2012 Edward P. Morgan III