A Question

Life it’s mundane self. This morning, in the dark, I fed the cats, rolled the trash can to the curb, and walked around looking at the trees with a flashlight. That last bit might sound weird. But it’s satisfying to walk around and look at trees in the dark, especially the ones I planted, which are now tall and seem totally capable of ignoring me, whereas before, when they were small, they depended on me for water and staking them to help them grow straight.

Now the trees seem relatively impervious to my presence, which I suppose is in the nature of trees. I guess that’s why they’re so easy to cut down. They don’t really see us coming and there’s nothing they can do about it even if they did. They just stand there and grow, generating oxygen and helping keep the air clean, until someone comes along with an axe or a chainsaw and says, we need that wood. It will be a long while before that happens at my house, but you never know, although I suspect it will fall outside the boundaries of my lifetime.

And I have no idea where I’m going with this. But here we are in the last paragraph having gone somewhere. I suppose it’s a bit like a walk down a trail you’ve never been on. You’re hoping for some sort of payoff, but in the end you just have a few nice things you looked at along the way and there you are at the end of the trail, and you realize there isn’t any more and then you get to decide whether you want to be disappointed because you didn’t get a big bang, or just be happy with what you saw and let it go at that. I guess it depends on what sort of life you’d like to lead.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale