Visiting an old friend
Yesterday afternoon, the kids and I rode the horses up the mountain to visit an old friend.
A venerable cedar.
He lives way up on a ridge above our ranch. Most of the trees he grew up with are now blue gray ghosts. Their trunks surround him like memories along with a few young upstarts, pinon that are perhaps fifty years old.
We've stopped and rested in our friend's shade over the years. We've eaten peanut butter sandwiches beneath his gnarled boughs. Matilda-the-tenacious heeler likes to curl up at his hoary roots for a mid-ride siesta. Our horse Caprichosa tried to bite a chunk out of him once, and got a good tap on the nose from J., who is protective of the aged.
Whenever I see this bulldogged cedar, rooted to the red rocks and earth, clinging to the mountainside, probably for about a thousand years, or so it seems, I think of what the boy Jim said in Willa Cather's My Antonia
"Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons."
Eight-year-old C. places his hand tenderly on the cedar's rough bark. Almost as if it would bruise like the translucent skin of his beloved Jack, whom he visits every week at the home for senior citizens. And I wait. Knowing we are going to have the same conversation we always have.
Gosh, Mom, how old do you think this old guy is?
I lean back where I'm sitting on a rock on the ground, and give the wizened cedar a good once over yet another time.
I don't know. What do you think? I ask.
C. knits his brows together. They are handsome Scotsman eyebrows. My mom calls them wizard eyebrows. But C. gets mad if we talk about them or his beautiful eyes much, although every now and then I catch him admiring his reflection in the mirror. He is trying not to let me see him using his fingers because he's doing some apparently complex math.
I think we're doing exactly what Jim was talking about.
