The Answer is in the Sky

The Answer is in the Sky

So I was back in the tree house again, Lord over all I surveyed. Well at least the backyard anyway, where I sat alone over an uncut lawn and a garden that had needed weeding for quite sometime So many happy times I’ve had here. So much looking up at the sky and letting my imagination run like a wild horse in a meadow as I watched the clouds and gave their shapes names. Named the birds too, and I learned to recognize pretty much each one by sight as it flew by. This treehouse was my retreat, my place to go when happy or sad, bored, or excited

But times are different on this most recent visit. I am not 10 years old anymore, far from it. I had to climb the much harder tree of life to reach 42. My parents and two sisters have moved on and moved out. It is just my uncle and me in the old house now. My aunt died five years ago, and my uncle is spending most of his time away from the place with his new girl friend Tina. I can’t blame him. Still, it is dinner for one, breakfast too. Lunch is alone at my desk at work.

The treehouse is older too. The once bright green paint on the guardrails, and the floorboards I can only see in dull patches here and there Still the boards have held up fairly well. I found no rotten wood as I tested out the floor with careful steps.

 So I am alone now, not for the first time. My second marriage ended like the first in a sudden divorce that I should have seen coming, but again ignored all the key signs. My ex-wife is staying in our old apartment. She kicked me out, and I didn’t want to fight her on her staying there. It had been more her place than mine. Now I live in the house in which I grew up. I have no plans with no immediate drive to live elsewhere – just working, having meals alone and sleeping likewise. 

           As I sit on the old plastic chair that had never left the tree house, I think, ‘I am sitting up in the tree house that dad and I built when I was ten years old. It has always been a happy place for me. Now I am being my own tour guide, pointing out where the memories are. There’s the first nail dad let me drive in by myself. He even turned away so I wouldn’t feel watched when I struck my first blow with the hammer. He didn’t see how close I came to hitting my thumb. I was glad of that.”

           I look up, feel touched by a memory, and point upwards, ‘There’s the branch overhead where once there was a robin’s nest. I recall when a little one had fallen out, looking barely out of the shell. I picked it up with a plastic bag wrapped around it so that it wouldn’t fall any farther, and so the little one wouldn’t have an annoying human smell on its feathers that might spook mama in the nest. I shinnied up the trunk until I reached the branch where the nest was and put the little robin back in place. Mama robin had first made a fuss when her baby bird fell, and I picked it up. But she was silent when I returned her little one to the nest. It was one of the proudest moments in my life. Looking up where the nest once was I still get a good feeling.

           These are the kinds of thoughts that I am having on a sunny summer afternoon. Good memories springing up from every corner of the backyard that can be seen from the scanning heights of the treehouse..

Then I hear a hawk call out. It is a sound that I haven’t heard in many years. I look up and see the magnificent bird coasting like it is directing the breezes underneath its wings. The bird gently circles the sky above me, dancing in the air. It is like the hawk is putting on a show just for me. I had watched such a scene from the treehouse many times, many years ago.  It still gives me a thrill. The hawk starts me thinking about my own life, my own flight of being, recently grounded yet again.

Maybe I should be like him – I don’t know why I thought that this hawk is a male. Maybe I can be like him and create beauty, joy on my own, alone. Maybe I don’t have to share it with someone who might just leave me or kick me out. Fail marriage once, and you can blame the other person. Fail marriage twice, and you have to take a close look at yourself. What’s that Michael Jackson, “the man in the mirror?”  Maybe a shared life is not for me.

But my lesson in the sky is not to be over yet. I hear another hawk sound, almost the same, but distinctive somehow in ways I cannot explain.. I look up again, and now I see two hawks gracing the sky with their presence. The beauty of the solo dancer is now being outdone by the two birds moving together like they were joined somehow by invisible strings. Maybe that is what I have come here to see. Maybe that is the lesson I needed to learn from spending this afternoon in the treehouse.

In the Treehouse a Few Weeks Later

Up the laddered trunk I go, easily making my way up, but doing it slowly, so the first moments in the treehouse can be more savoured as something that I have accomplished. Once up there and sitting on one of the old chairs I had a short time ago struggled to put up there, I become a tour guide of memories yet again. But this time the audience is sitting in another chair, and the woman with the robin’s egg blue eyes and the red parrot earrings.is enjoying my stories like she had lived them herself and that they gave her some hints as to what her future would be with me. She wonders, but does not seem to question whether we will create some beautiful memories ourselves, maybe with children. We neither of us are too old to enjoy a flight in tandem. If the hawks can do it, so can we.