While on separate walks, my mother and I talk to each other on the phone—she in Pennsylvania and I in Missouri. It is part of our long-distance connection.
I tell her I hear a pileated woodpecker jackhammering in the forest behind my neighborhood, where the edge of my suburban landscape meets the protected trails and woods.
“We have a yellow-bellied sapsucker at the house,” she responds.
“Oh yeah?” I think this is a story about bird sightings.
“It’s boring holes into your maple tree. The tree is dying.”
I pause.
“Last year, I sprayed my outdoor grill with peppermint to keep the wasps from building a nest inside the lid,” I tell my mother. “It seemed to keep them away.”
“Were they hornets or wasps?” my mother asks.
“I don’t know the difference.”
“Neither do I,” she says.
“That’s probably why I don’t know either.” We laugh at our sameness, at how knowledge is passed from parent to child, even now when I’m middle-aged and she is older. “But really, Mom, see if there’s a way to keep the birds from killing the maple.”
“You always liked to look at the branches through your bedroom window.”
Even from this distance across space and time, I can see the halo-colored morning light that my maple filtered onto my bedroom floor. The image takes me right back to the comfort of my childhood. I can feel the shaded cool it lent me during sweltering summers decades ago, around the same time when my mother hung sheer curtains that she bought just for me and then named the tree mine. Surely, it can be saved. Surely, this conversation can’t cause its demise. A tree feels like a permanent thing. I grew beside it, but my view of it through my window remained the same; beyond its seasonal shifts, I rarely noticed its own changes.
Photo Credit: Kathleen H. Manzella
Now, though, I know that the sapsucker’s drilling forces the tree to leak. After all these years, the tree’s life is draining. It’s been a long time since I was home when the leaves were falling. There’s much I no longer see.
“It will probably have to go,” my mother says. I hear her own pause before she changes the subject.
We both continue walking.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear each other when we’re so far apart. ⬥
—
Cover Photo by Kathleen H. Manzella
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