The Trees Outside My Window

A row of trees with elephantine trunks lines the potholed street that leads me home. Their long-knuckled branches seem to point accusingly at me as I drive past. Whatever their grudge against me, I probably deserve it. For years, I paid them so little attention I couldn’t say if they were maple, elm, or oak.

The shush and click of the door at my back, after I park my car and step inside, sounds like relief as I head to the kitchen, whose backyard windows look out on a welcome expanse of lawn and meadow. Mornings, when I rinse the breakfast dishes, I might catch the startled glance of a doe through the glass, or watch a kitten prance at the far edge of the lawn. In summer, sunflowers stretch their spines, then raise their golden heads.

But I can’t escape the trees. Upstairs in my office my desk faces three windows that frame three views of those snaggle-gray sentries. I didn’t used to mind—it was easy to change the scenery: Afternoons, I’d pack my laptop and work at a nearby café. Whenever I pleased, I’d visit Manhattan, where each time I stepped onto the platform at Grand Central, the stink and hustle embraced me like a dear old friend. Several times a year I’d escape New England freezes or heavy humid summers with trips to some island or Europe to work or visit friends.

That was how things were—until the pandemic (weeks, months, a year, then more) set in. Day after day those trees bore the brunt of my discontented gaze. I wanted to see ocean, or skyscraper, or even just a band of open sky—anything except those stubborn wardens rising up to cage me in.

One late December afternoon, at the cusp of another Covid year, I came across a poem by a Buddhist nun who, centuries ago, observed that we disassemble day by day as the world, too, breaks apart around us. As I looked up from the page to contemplate the constancy of change, a cloud shuffled past and a stripe of sunlight—as if to make the nun’s point for her—painted itself onto the bark of the tree outside. For a moment, I glimpsed it as it was: Steady, but not unchanging. Hadn’t the now-frozen ground been softening awake when the virus first sent us all inside? Then buds shimmered like a mossy aura at the tips of branches—as if they, too, were edging across a border from the known into something never tried before. The leaves unfurled and fell. Squirrels scritched and spiraled up the trunks and over branches, below which deer nosed for food, their hides darkening to camouflage among bare trees again in winter.

Each morning now I greet those trees: my teachers, my companions. They have become my daily prayer: Lord help me shift my gaze so I can know my place, and learn to love it.