#5 decembrance 2024

One year I bought Warren a Fitbit as a gift. He had told me that he wanted to get more exercise and so I imagined him taking longer walks to get in his steps. Instead, he began to join me on my evening walk. At that point in time I thought of my evening stroll as a time to daydream/meditate/ponder the landscape or re-imagine the frustrations of the studio. I did not always welcome the company. Our compromise was that I could tell Warren anytime I wanted to walk alone and there would be no hard feelings.

When we walk together we often talk about the trees. When Warren was a kid he disliked sycamores because in his Long Island neighborhood they always looked sick to him, dropping bark, being the last to leaf out, and among the first to drop leaves in the Fall. In the winter landscape I love the sycamore as the white bark stands out against the sky. We often like to walk along the Rappahannock River where we admire the woods, the water, boulders, and undergrowth. We love to identify the oaks, tulip poplars, and beech trees, talking about their habits.

This is the direction we get lost in. 
Beech, sweetgum, more oak. But she 
was impatient too, you say, it is possible
she willed him to look back. We do not love alone
is what I think you mean. When I walk behind you,
the back of your head is golden, ungovernable
light I cannot look away from. Is it love
that to follow you I find myself choosing
an unexpected path; should we find the tree,
will it be I who led us there or you? Long gone
are the leaves alternate, compounded, each
an arrow, the thrust of a green thought; 
along the forest floor centuries crack and turn
to dust. We have children, grudges,
a Dionysian mortgage, habits
mostly bad, and yet every December
I imagine spring, our time past
and to come, how when you follow me
I track the blazes to reach the river, and often
I have to stop myself from looking back.
To stay together, look away, some god said.
Here in these trees, our voices have no 
faces, we’ve walked like this for an eternity.

–Jennifer Chang, excerpt from “The Lonely Humans”