Maypole in Vermont

A story I wrote in college, which seems apt today. Posted on my Facebook page, in responses to a writing prompt.

Maypole in Vermont

May 1, 2018

My roots run deep in the rich, dark soil, tendrils spreading out beneath the forest floor, twining with the living roots of the many trees and plants that share my home.  I am young, as trees go, and the sweet, cool, living water that mingles with the life of the soil refreshes me, gives me strength, and helps me to grow straight and strong.  The tips of my roots tingle as they reach outward, growing longer and more complex as I grow taller and spread my branches wide above the forest floor.

              The sun shines on the forest, and my leaves greedily lap up the warm, life-giving rays.  There have been many days of cold darkness, when even the light of the sun has been feeble and pale, and has not warmed the leaves.  I shudder as I remember those recent days when my branches were stark skeletons against a chilly, grey sky.  My fresh, green leaves, newly unfurled in the sun's tender warmth, tremble as I shudder, and the gentle music they make as they rustle against each other reminds me that the cold time has ended, giving me renewed peace and joy.

              My thoughts turn from the past cold to delight in warmth and new life.  As the leaves drink in the light of the sun, the cool water of life that flows up from my spreading roots turns thick and sweet.  My veins throb with the force of creation as the sap in my veins spreads energy from my strong, even trunk to the tiniest, newest leaves bursting tender and green from the purple buds on my smallest, youngest twigs.

              The wind whispers softly through the forest, a gentler face of the violent, frigid gales that whipped my branches in the cold time.  I am strong and confident, and my trunk sways with the rhythm of the swirling currents.  The swish and shush of leaves rubbing against each other sings with the whoosh and whirl of the music of the wind.

              I am immersed in peace and contentment.  My life is just beginning, and the future stretches out before me, pregnant with possibilities and promises of glorious growth amid my sister trees and the multitude of plants of the forest.

              “Papa!  Papa, come quick!  That’s the tree!  That’s the prettiest, perfectest tree in the forest!”  A strange, piping voice shatters the singing stillness as the warm sun curves across the highest point of the impossibly high sky.  The effort to focus on one small, noisy, human creature is unpleasant, as I cannot stretch myself out to communicate with earth and trees, sun, wind, and sky when I must gather my senses into my center to pay attention to this intruder.

              “Why, Azubah, that really is a fine, young tree.”  The deeper, calmer voice comes from a larger human.  It rubs its leafless twigs against my smooth, silver trunk.  There is unfamiliar warmth in the strangely soft twigs, and I feel an odd sense of dread.  More of the small humans come out from between my sister trees, their strange, rootless trunks split grotesquely in two to allow them movement over the earth.  The small humans squeal and screech as they surround my trunk, all of their strange, soft twigs grasping at me at once.

              Suddenly, the larger human makes a sound and the small humans move back into the forest.  Sure that the humans need my attention no longer, my senses flow back into the comforting, familiar rhythms of the earth and sky.

              The pain is sudden and unexpected.  The human’s steel cuts deeply into my tender bark, slicing through delicate veins filled with sap, parting first my harder, outer wood, coming to rest in the softer, sensitive, heartwood just above the place where the rich earth shelters my hidden roots.  I feel the sweet, clear sap leaking from my veins, bleeding out across the smooth, deadly steel.  I shudder and cry out in silent agony to the surrounding forest, but there is no help against the humans.  I gasp, shuddering my twigs and leaves, as the steel is pulled out of my trunk.  The gash is horrible.  Why am I being hurt?  What have I done but give cooling shade and breathe out the toxic oxygen that the humans crave to breathe? 

              The second strike cuts deeper than the first.  My heartwood bleeds life-giving sap that will now never reach the fresh, green leaves at my crown.  I have no time to think of the pain as the axe �" yes, that is the name of the human’s weapon, as I have heard in the thoughts of older trees, an axe �" bites deeply again, and yet again.  Small pieces of my bark, my sapwood, my heartwood fly away from the gaping wound at my base.  Droplets of sap spatter into the air, falling on the moss and grasses at my feet.  With each strike, I feel my life-force ebbing, my strength draining away from me.  I can no longer feel the roots that twine with mine, because my roots are being severed from my trunk.  The sun seems to darken as fewer and fewer of my tender leaves feel its warmth.

              “Watch out, girls!  Don’t let it fall on you!”  The larger human shouts to the small ones in a voice that is deep for his kind, but that sounds shrill in my raw, mindless agony.

It is over.  The last cut of the axe breaks the last, tenuous connection between my trunk and my roots.  I fall to the forest floor, crashing through the branches of my sister trees, but no longer able to feel their cries of pain and outrage.  I am alone within myself, cut off from the earth, the sun, the sky, and all that which has been my world since my first sprout put forth my first, hesitant root into the earth.  The silence of my solitude is deafening, and I fear that I will go mad.  I am living wood, but I have no real life now that I have lost my connection to the forest.

The small humans swarm over my trunk, climbing onto it, shrieking their triumph over my noble form.  I try to ignore the humiliation.  Before reason can begin to assert itself, the agony begins again.  The axe bites into my trunk just below my majestic crown.  I shudder and retreat as deeply into my living core as I can as the horrible carnage continues.  My crown is severed from my trunk, cutting off the last whisperings of  twigs and leaves, forever stilling the music of my foliage.  Again I scream my silent pain and anger to the universe, and again there is no help.  When my crown is gone, the axe chops away my branches until there is nothing left of me but a naked, bleeding, mutilated trunk.  The forest floor is littered with pieces that were part of me hardly a heartbeat before. 

The larger human lifts my trunk with his �" hands.  Some random, rational bit of me remembers that the old trees tell that the humans call their branches arms and their twigs hands.  It lifts my top end from the ground, and the smaller ones join together to lift my bottom end.  I hand suspended in the air among them, not even allowed the final mercy of resting with my branches and leaves on the forest floor.  The humans carry me out of the forest, passing between the sister trees whose selves I will never touch again.

The humans move me to a small, open meadow, surrounded by large, strange forms that are built of the bodies of oaks and pines, maples and cedars.  I shiver at my core to be surrounded by the dead remains of so many once-living trees. 

Many humans surround the meadow.  More emerge from the structures made from the dead trees.  They all shout and cry out to the humans that carry me.  Other hands take me from the small humans and I am carried to the center of the meadow.

“Oh, Papa, will they put it up now?  Is it time, Papa?”

“Mama, Mama, Look!  They got a pole!”

“The pole!  Townsend’s got us a pole!”

There are too many voices shouting about a pole.  What is a pole?  As the pain slowly deadens in my gruesome wounds, confusion wells up in me.  Why has this happened to me?  What will the humans do to me?  What is a pole?

Dizziness engulfs me as the humans raise me upright.  I have no time to wonder what they are doing now, or to examine the new wave of fear that washes through me.  They drop me, upright, into a hole in the earth.  The hole is not deep, and it is just wide enough to encircle my trunk.  The humans shovel moist, living earth into the hole, filling all of the spaces around my bark.  The earth is cool, and a surge of hope overtakes me.  I struggle to reach out, to extend new roots into the earth, as I did when I first sprouted from the seed so long ago.  My straining is in vain.  My severed veins have sealed, and will never again draw water from the earth or touch the grasses and plants that grow in the earth around me.  The veins at my top are closed, as well, and will never again send out buds to unfurl into tender leaves that drink in the rays of the sun.

Something new is happening.  One of the humans places something close beside my trunk.  Revulsion fills me as I recognize that this, too, like the larger structures, is made from the dead wood of once-living trees.  The human climbs to the top of the dead thing.  Without warning, new agony fills me.  The human is pounding a long, cold stick of biting steel into the center of the top of my ravaged trunk.  Long vines fall from the steel stick to hang about my trunk, coiling in piles on the earth at my base.

“Mama, look at the ribbons!  They look like flowers!”  One of the tiniest humans squeals and points at the vines.  The pounding has stopped, and I am free to notice that the tiny human is right.  The vines are the colors of buttercups, violets, primroses, and other flowers of the forest and the meadow.  Have the humans given me new leaves to mock me?  Is the earth about my rootless base to taunt me for what has been stripped from me?

“Azubah, Mary, Maggie, hurry and get in the circle.”  Three of the small humans who carried my trunk from the forest join a circle of their kind about my base.  All humans look more or less alike, but these are nearly identical to each other.  They look like huge reflections of the delicate lilies-of-the-valley that carpet the forest floor.  Each one bends to the earth, a strange echo of the way the lilies dip to the earth when they are heavy with new at the rising of the sun after the short darkness.  The pain fades as I focus out of my core, reaching toward these humans.

Each human in the circle picks up one of the �" ribbons.  The tiny human called the vines ribbons.  The circle spreads out, and each small human is strangely connected to me through the ribbons.  The tiny one runs toward me, and a large one places a chunk from an ancient tree against my base.  The ancient one is not quite dead, although all of her roots and branches are gone, and there is hardly any moist sap left in her living wood.  The tiny one climbs onto the ancient one’s remaining bit of trunk.

“Hail the Queen of the May!”  Nearly every human shouts at once, surprising me with the life-giving force that flows among them in this moment.

“Ruthie, smile for the camera.  You’re the Queen of the May,” calls the one called Azubah.  All of the small humans turn to face one of their kind, and a tiny sun explodes from an object I do not know.

The ones holding the ribbons begin to move about my trunk in a dizzying display.  Some circle about me one direction, while the rest circle the other direction.  As they go round and round, they move closer to my trunk.  I realize that I am being covered with a pattern of flower colors as the ribbons weave together about me.  I feel the life and the energy of the dancers, and I hear music deep in my core such as I never thought to hear again.  I discover that I have been severed from my life in the forest so that the humans can celebrate life and draw strength from the earth, from the sun, from the colored ribbons, and from me.  Suddenly, I know what a pole is.  I am the pole.  I am the center of a celebration of life.  I feel the ancient one affirming my discovery as the last glimmer of life seeps from her bit of trunk into the living earth.

I am living wood.  I am part of the world, even though I have become apart from the world.  I am the pole.  I am wrapped in life, in love, and in hope for the future.

 

Author's Note

Please ignore typos. Initial reactions and constructive criticism welcome. Note, my grandmother is one of the girls in the photo, but I forget which one.

Reviews

[Elaine]

Fan of this. That the author's grandmother was in the photo.... even cooler.

[Debbie Barry]

Thanks, Elaine! I'm really pleased that you enjoyed it.