Trunks and Mounds

The trunks swayed in the woods this morning.  I sat down while talking with a friend on the phone, and I watched them.  They were tall and skinny for tree trunks, and they swayed, and I thought, Oh, this is how they go down.  I never see them when they fall, only afterwards.  After a storm, we take walks through the woods and we notice which trees have fallen, admiring the trunks or walking on them, checking out the uprooted roots (polyptoton!  Maddie Farrell's favorite figure of speech...).  We climb and explore and check out the place where the trunk split.

I've started to slow down on my walks.  During the school year I am focused and goal-oriented, wanting my one hour walk through neighborhoods near school or so focused on chatting with a girlfriend in person or on the phone that I don't notice my surroundings as much...except maybe the flowers on the corner, near the water tower in Braintree.  You can't miss those.

But today I sat on a downed trunk and looked across fifty yards, as my girlfriend and I talked, just sat there and watched the swaying trunks.  Maybe they'll be down tomorrow.

Today the mounds were gone.  Six or seven huge mounds of dirt that have covered a trail for the past three years -- gone.  

Before the mounds, as we've called them in our house, were trucked and dumped here, there was a trail that we walked when we didn't have time or energy to go to the top and do the full loop.  This trail cuts across the creek, then by a metal bench that looks like it came from a soccer or football field (how did that get there and how many years ago?  I've imagined teenagers wanting a place to drink, and one night hauling this metal bench up to the woods, pleased with themselves to have set up their own drinking spot in the woods rather than a parking lot, as kids did when I was in high school -- I was never cool enough to be in the parking lot crowd, but I my older sister was and my soccer and cheerleader friends, too), then by a ledge edged (polyptoton again...well, sort of...) with poison ivy on both sides.  When I walked this way with my husband, who gets poison ivy easily, he'd say, "We need to wash our pants when we get home."  He did; I didn't.  The trail winds a bit more and then finally comes to the top of a dead end road.  It was our short loop, the loop to do before dinner with a friend and her dog, with a child who needed to get outside but didn't want to be out too long, with myself when I needed a feel of the woods.

One day (maybe) three years ago, the last fifty yards of the trail, the part that led to the road, was gone.  Where the trail had been were huge mounds of dirt, seemingly impassable.  The city had forced the owner of this land to take down his radio tower nearby in the woods.  The owner of the radio tower was so angry with the city that he put these hills of dirt, about ten feet high and seven feet wide, over this part of the trail, we assumed, to block it.  (When I asked our City Councilor about it, he said, "I've told the owner that he's not hurting the city by putting the dirt there; he's hurting his neighbors.")  For a long time, we didn't use the trail.  It was blocked.  But at some point, likely because of a child's curiosity, we tried going over the mounds, as we called them.  The kids loved to climb over them, and I got used to them as just part of a the walk, a different way to do this part of the trail.  We came to love the mounds, as obstacles or fun or just another aspect of the park.

But today, after I pass the metal bench and the poison ivy and wind around to the road, the mounds do not hinder my view.  The ground is flat.  It's dirt, just flat dirt, looking like it's ready for a paving.  Our mounds are gone.   The kids might be disappointed.  Part of me is excited and part of me is disappointed, too.  I had come to like the mounds.

I wonder if that's the way changes go.  In one moment a hardship or obstacle; in another, a challenge; in another, a familiar part of life that you come not just to accept, but like and enjoy.