For one week in January the thermometer struggled to reach zero, a colder winter than we’ve had in six years. I’m hoping the hard freeze will knock back the deer ticks and woolly adelgid. It’s too late for the emerald ash borer, though. In a few short years they killed every ash tree on the mountain, a favorite of my father’s. I miss the ash’s orange-and-auburn parade in October.
This past fall I found a porcupine in the crotch of a young oak, ravaged by a fisher’s ragged teeth. Porcupines are docile and have few enemies—who wants to mess with their husk of barbs?—but as this porcupine slowly scaled the tree, the fisher scampered after, ripping at the soft belly where no quills sprout. The porcupine’s dead body draped the tree’s Y like a forgotten sweater.
*
My father died at the age of eighty-one, cancer’s axe felling him in less than four months. Since then he visits in dreams. And, when I’m in the woods, I’ll see his shoulders cause a tree’s limb to sway, or his leg will brush a fern, the frond nodding. In late winter he’ll whisper that spring’s coming, like the trickling water beneath the crusted white. I’m grateful he’s not the person who in the last week of his life was bathed in pain, the hospice nurse ushering him into a fog with morphine. I was afraid I’d have to live the rest of my life with the ghost of that frail body, which had lost nearly forty pounds, my mother weeping over what was left. When he visits in his red woolen cap, he’s the man who liked to laugh, who would hold my hand as we walked in the woods, squeezing it rhythmically then letting go to point to some tree or track. His legs scale the sharp incline of a ridge as he sees what’s revealed over the next peak.
*
On the first true spring day each year, I breathe the smell of melting earth and gasp as if I’ve been held underwater. White blossoms fleck the moss on old logging trails. Scarlet elf cup surfaces, and, in my impatience, I brush away a bit of duff to find delicate violet flowers held tightly in a slender fist. Brook trout look up with the first midge and caddis hatches, striking at most any fly on my line.
Fecundity doesn’t erase death. A week ago I found a buck—its antlers an uncharacteristically straight eight inches, like the shafts of arrows—dead in a pool of water halfway up the mountain. It appeared wraithlike, undefined. I thought about dragging it from the streambed but couldn’t deny the fish the sustenance the body provided. Once we’re dead, isn’t it better to feed another life than to worry about the decorum of how we’re put to rest?
*
These mountains were once covered by an ocean, and the steepest parts of the sandstone ridges have been whittled away by rain and ice and snow, forming small chapel-caves where bears will sleep come December, heart and breath slowed, waiting for some resurrection. We might think they were dead if we stumbled into their chambers.
The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside. My body begs me to let it sleep during these months, the air cold in the house while, in my dreams, I rehearse the picking of summer berries, the fish I’ll catch, the deer I’ll hunt. My parents young again, healthy and vital.
*
Before my father entered hospice, we walked a trail that paralleled a creek. He took a degree of relief in these walks, stopping every few steps to catch his breath and praise a wildflower’s colors, talking about what they promised.
A few miles away that same creek bordered my parents’ home, where they used to grow a garden in a two-acre floodplain. We spent the better part of each day among the skeletal remnants of last year’s garden, the creek sounding if we’d had rain the day before. He’d sit in a chair and instruct me as I cleaned the barn, oiled the chain saw, made sure there was enough air in the tractor’s tires. I was helping him get his affairs in order. He worried about what would happen to my mother after he was gone.
If it weren’t for the cancer, we’d have been planting a garden together. We would have already harvested early lettuce and been turning small holes with a stick, dropping in seeds for kohlrabi, tomatoes, peppers, onions, too many varieties of squash to name. I’d hold the wooden shafts for pole beans as he tied them with twine. We’d weed the asparagus bed, cut stalks of rhubarb for pie and jam. After his death, my mother insisted I take the rototiller. Now I use it to turn my garden.
*
Many of us want the comfort of knowing that our deceased loved ones are in a place that transcends the earth, some heaven or paradise beyond the blue, but I’m suspicious of stories that imply there’s a better world than the one we’ve been given. Our home here is written in the intricate designs of our DNA, so much of which we share with other creatures. If we look around, it’s clear that one thing grows out of another, one thing feeds another.
When I was eight, lightning seared a gash down the side of a sugar maple in our woods. The following February sap began to run, and a long slick formed, freezing each night and thawing as the day warmed. Up to that point I hadn’t been interested in trees. I liked to climb them, liked to add a piece of wood to the fire, but trees were mundane to a boy who lived much of his life in comic books. My father, however, revered them. He’d show me a hackberry he’d decided to cut for firewood, run his hand along the trunk of a white oak he was planning to save. He’d ask me what I thought certain trees might be saying to each other, a question science is finally asking, too. He told me I ought to lick the injured sugar maple to taste its wound. When my tongue touched the slick, sweetness overwhelmed my mouth. My relationship with trees, and my father, was never the same.
*
The November after he died, I carried my father’s ashes to a mountain slope where huckleberries grow, from which you can watch eagles and hawks spiraling in updrafts. I took a handful of what was left of my father’s body and spread it at the base of the huckleberry bushes. Each June since, I climb to see those bushes’ flowers in bloom: tiny ivory-pink bells that hang down, bees humming among them. In early July, when the berries ripen, I risk this precarious slope to pick and eat, listening for timber rattlers. I roll the berries’ purple over my tongue and taste my father’s gladness.
