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| Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. |
It seems not quite alive, but neither is it fully dead, apparently.
Short and stunted, its hard bare branches spread outward at broken angles like those of trees in the haunted forests of childhood fairy tales. Sepia-toned bark, hard and splintery, peels off in strips in some places; in others, it's solid gray iron.
Inhospitable . . .or so it seems, especially in this season when the air is so icy that simple breathing burns.
And yet . . . .
Home it isn't, but it is a way-station of sorts. Throughout the year, the ravens gather in its branches, as do their smaller, more colorful magpie cousins. At dusk the tree is alive with their chatter, avian shouts and laughter and eventually lullabies.
It stands above a coyote crossing, and the birds use it as an outpost, keeping watch over their own, and occasionally, over others, too. Even when camouflaged deep in its recesses, in the crotches and notches where the branches first emerge from the trunk, their voices carry loud on the winter air when they feel the need to raise the alarm.
It's a perch, a blind, a hunter's lair for the raptors, the red-tails and harriers and Cooper's hawks who come to visit in ones and twos.
It's a threshold, a boundary, a wayfarer's landmark; a stile, an outpost, a line of demarcation.
It's a marker of interstices, itself an interstice, hovering in a state of being between that which lives and that which does not; trunk on one side of an artificial line, roots and branches transgressing the space freely and openly; a host but not a home to those who travel through and above and beneath it.
It's probably why it feels like home to me.
