8.16.14 Maple chips and smoke and ashes, along with dinosaur bits and star dust, and each and every one of us

I spoke to my friend about being an Arborist.

He told me he had so many jobs as a young man, that would bore him to tears; that he'd leave at the drop of a hat. Until he began doing tree work.

You see, with tree work, you understand trees.  You help people increase the health of trees. Trim them and assess them and adjust them, if there are two trunks and water will gather between them, like rot between two lovers, to lay the relationship to waste. 

And like a veterinarian, he comes , too, to bring trees down.

Like our sick, old, rotted Maple. Here before the house was built in the 1940's. 

Here for at least 100 years.

But with one of those trunks that had triplets! So that water and debris gathered and rotted down through the center. 

Of course, the neighborhood of chipmunks adored the tree. It had a small magical entryway at the base, and those small creatures would scoot right up that doorway....and appear at the apex of the three trunks, peering at you, in delight.

One of the trunks was rotten straight through, so that there was a chipmunk thoroughfare all the way up. Possibly with a view, who knows.

The beautiful Maple would have encountered one of those really wild Northeaster's, slamming up the fields from the river, and finally have given way.

Now someone will dry and cut and then warm their home with the old Maple, and it the scent will rise and the chips will compost something, somewhere. And from the fireplace will come the smoke; and in the fireplace will be the ashes, both returned outdoors to the earth. In good company with dinosaur bits and star dust and each and every one of us.