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Lovers falling from the sky
Sometimes when a child loses a parent, the loss can be so great for the remaining parent that it appears to the child that both parents are lost. Subsequently, the child can feel temporarily or perhaps forever like an orphan
I am sleeping and in my sleep I am dreaming. In my dream I have returned to my childhood, a young girl in the farmhouse where I grew up. From my bedroom window, I can see a row of very tall spruce trees. Standing like guardians at the bottom of the garden, I imagine them protecting me from the rest of the world that comes and goes down the road just beyond the garden. In my dream, she is sleeping. It is night time and outside there is a violent rainstorm; she is awakened by a thunderous crash. It is a sound so huge that it resonates throughout the entire house, punctuating the silence of the night and she knows that nothing will ever be the same again. Slowly she gets out of bed and climbs hesitantly down the stairs. The storm is |
sweeping motions into the room and over the piles of rubbish. Light from some indistinguishable source catches the tops of the branches glistening in the wet needles as they move back and forth. A voice reverberates and she doesn't know if she has spoken the words, or if she hears them. It says, "it is a two leader tree." Two tree tops have fallen in a single blow and when they came crashing down onto the house, they pulled the hydro lines down with them. The current was now escaping into the earth and was heading towards the water well.
Today, there are only two trees left holding up either end of the once long row of elegant spruce trees. We didn't know it then, but all the heavy traffic there compressed the roots and they slowly withered away one after the other.
Only a young girl when my mother died, I saw that no one or no thing could protect me from |
just starting to abate, but the wind is still howling and as she reaches the bottom of the steps, she can feel it gusting from room to room. She peers into the darkness of the living room. Mortar, bricks, broken branches and glass shards spread out across the floor, reaching all the way to where she is standing bare foot. There, in the middle of a gaping hole and cutting across her view through what should be the window is now a long horizontal tree trunk. Standing there hypnotised, she watches the wind push the huge branches in short ineffectual
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everything and that even trees can fall in a storm. The farmhouse sits now like a gaping mouth on the horizon - toothless without those trees, naked between parenthesis.
"Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping." |
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