December 1, 2006
Friday 

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became a part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
                                 — Walt Whitman, 1819-1892
                                      American poet

The street where I live is lined with pin oaks, trees whose leaves do not fall before winter but turn a deep bronze, gradually curl and crumble, and then disappear when the new spring growth appears. The lower branches of a pin oak droop, and so they should not be used as a street tree. Maybe the developer of our neighborhood didn’t know that, or had a real deal on a thousand pin oaks. In the thirty years since they were planted they have grown tall and straight, but they’ve had to be trimmed sharply to keep the right-of-way clear and to allow people to walk upright on the sidewalk without having to push open a path.

When I went forth this morning the air was warm and wet, almost spring-like. As the garage door went up I saw the tree beside the sidewalk in front of my neighbors’ house as if for the first time. The side toward the sidewalk looks normal, but the street side is trimmed so high that the pyramid shape of the tree is lost. I stood there for some time looking at it and thinking about what it might mean that I was so drawn to the image of a lopsided, almost misshapen tree that nevertheless stands sturdy and strong.

I enter my third Holidailies season driven by an urgency to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” as Whitman’s contemporary Henry David Thoreau would have it. Whitman outlived Thoreau by thirty years. Since September I’ve seen four of my own contemporaries die, two of them by suicide, all of them under sixty. I’ll be sixty in March.

Regular readers of this space know that. They also know that I live in a suburb of Pennsylvania’s capital city with my husband and the spirit of our daughter, Lynn. Lynn herself lives in a townhouse with two other girls about a quarter mile beyond the back gate of her college campus, and that’s the first time that I’ve said that she lives there rather than that she stays there. Last year we changed some aspects of our Christmas traditions to accommodate our changing lives. This year we’ll change more.

I’m trying to turn my sorrow at my friends’ passing and my disorientation in the face of all this change into something positive. I’ve found energy for some projects that have long lain dormant, and I’m ready to step into Advent, the season of watchful waiting, with hope.