Do you have times when it seems like something is lost/gone forever?

My daughter, Hunter, recommended a book to me: The Last Fire Season, by Manjula Martin, a month or so ago. I didn’t start it and didn’t start it and… I just started it. All summer I’d been celebrating the clean air and now… smoke blowing from California.

Reading the book, I was caught up right away by the fascinating history behind forest fires, the history of CA and the native people. I’m astonished by how little I knew about the utter humanitarian devastation. Heart wrenching, truly. How MUCH was lost.

Aside from the lack of human history, the book also talks about the trees. How the Sequoia redwood trees have been strong at withstanding fires, especially those caused by lightening. One way is their innate ability to rebound from their rootballs. They may appear dead above ground, but their roots are alive.

I thought of my redbud.

In an earlier post, I had mentioned that the mama chickadee loved to use it as a perch when coming to and from her nest. The tree looked dead. It seemed to have been unable to recover from the shock of a late frost.

But here it is, a month or so later:

Can you believe it? All that new growth coming up from the roots. I took out the blackened sad middle trunk in hopes that the tree will find a new upright path.

But this is what I love to see!

I love to see the rebound when it seems as if all is gone/ not going the way you had hoped.

I think back to this last winter. The whole landscape here was not only covered in snow, but the weather kept vacillating between warm and cool, so the snow was covered in a sheet of ice. I know this because I was here at the end of January.

I’m not usually here in NH in winter. I don’t want to be alone. But I had decided to drive up a day earlier than my partner because I had a doctor’s appointment for my sore left hip.

En route, the car acted up, so I pulled over and 2 hours later my car, Peaches and I were riding in a tow truck from CT (no snow) to ice-crusted NH. The tow truck deposited me and my pup along the very quiet highway at the top of my driveway. Pitch dark at 6 o’clock. I was able to negotiate the snowplow ice crusted edge of the highway to walk from the tow truck to climb back into my car and drive safely down the driveway to my home, nice and warm(thanks to Heather).

So, yes. I can say that I have seen the seemingly dead time of year for my dear redbud. And I did wonder, as the weather got warmer and days longer, if it would be alive still. May and June passed… It took some time for the roots to bring their truth up to sprout new growth. And when the first leaves arrived, it was shocking and welcome – yes, it’s rebounding!

I love summer, the long days swimming in the sun-warmed lake water. The turning of the leaves in fall is later at the lake than in the nearby mountains, but I notice the change happening as the days get shorter and colder. In formidable winter, I’m surprised by how beautiful the white snow and lack of color can actually be. And spring, a-a-ah.

Time does shift the world. The weather keeps flowing through the seasons. The trees know it.

And so do the animals:

They know the seasons. We do too. And we feel them as they ask us to reach deep.

We may not be able to change history.

But we each have our root strength, don’t we?

We share this earth we love.