I wake at sunrise, splash my face. Add some layers to face the 40° temperature. Out the back door, I interrupt the mockingbird poking at breakfast in my unmown yard. He gives me a look before he flights into the sapling. I amble apologetically through the backyard up to the alley. The chilled air wakes my body as the rhythm of my pace warms me. The frosty gravel crunches as I crest the hill and pass the barn-style house at the end of the alley. The familiar careful plantings and cozy back porch always catch my eye, living holdouts since my old friends parted ways and moved away last year.

Down the hill, I’m pleasantly surprised to have Main Street and the late November morning quiet to myself for a few blocks. A bit further, crews from three bucket trucks are chatting and milling about, hooking up new electric lines for the long abandoned house coming to life on the corner. I mask up, collect a coffee at the Roasters next Door, and round the block toward the river. Old man Smiley is already there, adjacent the greenway, setting up his tent and setting out his used-bike options. I holler good morning at him. Just then a very large crow apparently feeling neglected barks out a nasally caw as it lands on the edge of a roof nearby. 

The water is clear and looks crisp. Pearly tones reflect the unmoving sky and mostly leafless trees with a cool elegance. I stop on the bridge and and feast my eyes on the rippling flows. Two mallards, one with head underwater, tail to the sky, the other acting as look out, are nibbling in the shallow weeds by the low water in the center. The lookout is unsure whether to signal to leave, but since I keep to the bridge, decides I’m no threat. 

There’s a calm to the river, a hush to the whole scene, as if nothing is in a hurry this morning. As I wander back across the bridge, the mirror of reflections takes my breath away. The great blue heron is hiding within the bank, on an overhanging limb. A needle in the wondrous river haystack that I’ve learned to spot. I pause, sip my warm joe, and watch its head do slow swivels, as it, in turn, spots fish.  It’s too high above the water to spear them, but can’t help but look. ​

A couple pairs of chatty joggers tread past and disrupt our reverie. Suddenly, the whole morning has been a prelude. The heron stretches its great neck, straightens high. It realizes I didn’t continue across the bridge with the others, and am alone, watching, ready for the solo. It  break the stillness, silently launches into a grand, graceful arabesque and with a few powerful wing strokes, floats on the air upstream, disappearing into the backstage haze.

It’s nothing extraordinary really. A cloudy morning in autumn, warm enough for a comfortable breakfast on the porch.

Through my jeans my rear end can feel a hint of dew from the cushion on the rocking chair. Neither butte nor I care, because I’ve got a bowl of warm oatmeal, nuts, raisins, and the extra delight of fresh raspberries from the magic stalks in the side yard. It’s holding warm in my friend Maya’s handmade bowl, my favorite go-to cereal bowl, the one with the glaze of speckled greens. A mug of aromatic freshly ground and brewed coffee steams in the humid air in that way that makes it taste so much better.  

The mockingbirds and blue jays and song sparrows are chatting and flitting about collecting breakfast. A gray cat glances at me then hurriedly pads off the shut-in neighbor’s porch and down the concrete steps. Across the street a squirrel nonchalantly does his high-wire act on the cables spanning the poles. There’s a faint breeze. 

All at once the shifting menagerie of secondary players takes second stage as the star, the sun, breaks through the clouds. Everything brightens. Clear golden rays spotlight the porch floor and make glowing patches on my jeans and sweatshirt. A sharp triangle of light erupts on the round porch table. The tips of the birds’ wings now flash silver as they zip past. The neighborhood is no longer coming awake, instantaneously it’s joyous. The earth rotated, the clouds momentarily parted, and a new day arrived. Extraordinary, really.  

Transitions

It seems natural to consider death and transitions on a full moon Halloween. In the waning weeks of summer, this tree on the bank of the Roanoke River loosened its grip in the rocky soil and let go, now immersed, partly, in the current. It was a sycamore, but more significantly than the name or species, it was for a time thriving as a tree form. The air taken in by the leaves and the nutrients in the soil nourished it enough enable it to grow a stout and solid trunk. I wonder how many other life forms attached, climbed, or perched on its branches? What scurried about its base? How many fish hid in the shadows it cast? How far did its leaves drift in the river, fly in the breezes, how many seeds sprouted perhaps after catching a lift to another region? What nested in its limbs? As the trunk hollowed, what families were birthed in the bosom of its protective trunk?

These and so many other unanswerable ponders, all stemming from one tree, among hundreds, on one bank, in one short stretch of one river. 

It stood out to me for years because it had been designated by someone unknown, with a metallic cross, for uncertain yet guessable reasons. At first it seemed an odd mark, but then I recalled hearing from a friend who lived in the not visible homes beyond the abandoned railroad tracks, past the steep cliff, the buffer of woods, and still further the green of the park grass. She had seen an ambulance crew and some police one cold morning haul up a covered body on a gurney from this same bank. 

I’ve now floated hundreds of times along this serene section of river through my neighborhood. It’s maybe a mile long. Within this vital and abundantly fertile route, in a short few years there have been at least three human deaths along these banks. Two were young adults my son’s age, in fact, one was the son of friend’s of mine, and the other was a friend of my son. Each of them may have been a suicide. The shaken foundations of families, the painful realities of these lives tragically transitioning, are not lost to me when I float here. How many beings were affected, enriched, touched by those lives?  

The old trunk suspended between worlds continues to give, and so I feel, to live. The shock of its loss shook and reassembled the foundations of all growth nearby. Fungi are now making use of its decades of stored minerals and rebirthing. Uprooted and no longer reaching skyward, still it shelters innumerable life forms. As the once rigid structure softens, it dissembles and feeds the soil and renews the land. Some nutrients disperse into the river and are steadily being delivered to other ecosystems. Even the now sideways cross loosens its meaning. The tree has shifted in form yet the energies still robustly affect and endlessly replenish the hallowed cycle of life.

I recently heard from a friend about a young former employee who ended his own life. Another who touched many, was perhaps more valued than he could grasp, and regrettably was compelled to let go... So many unfathomable, heart-wrenching questions. In contrast a few days ago was the first anniversary of the death of a much-beloved octogenarian who was fittingly known as “the Angel of Grandin Village” for his continuously selfless giving ways in our neighborhood. It was also the birthday of my father, who lived to near 90, gone now for nearly a decade. By any standard he lived a life as full and rich as one could live, and was as loving and giving as one could measure. One sapling passes before maturity, others flourished for so many decades, each impacted others directly and indirectly. Our human lives, all life, a mysterious, ongoing cycle, an unanswerable question to honor and celebrate.