The Seventh Sense

The Seventh Sense

The screams were horrible. She had never even been able to watch crime shows on TV that depicted people hurting others. It was a type of horror, not just good vs bad. They were not for her. But she wasn’t watching TV. She was sitting in her sunroom that morning, planning the day’s thoughts and activities with her trusty coffee, when she heard it. She thought somebody was being tortured. She heard a flurry of activity down the hill on the northeast side of her house. And the screams. They were muted at first and then became full-fledged cries.

She gulped in some air with a whimper, cautiously sat up straight, and stretched up to look over the windowsill. She reached for her phone in case a 911 call was in order. There was a white pickup truck parked in her neighbor’s backyard. There were three men wearing some kind of gear, two on the ground and one about fifteen feet up in the hundred-year-old tree. He had a chainsaw. When he yanked the cord, it roared to life, and the muted screams became amplified.

Liza cringed and put her hands over her ears. All that did was dumb down the chainsaw sound. The calls of terror were as loud as before. The man in the tree placed the saw blade at just the correct angle and buzzed into the one-foot-diameter limb. After a fifteen-second steady push, the twenty-foot limb thudded to the ground. He moved his support cord to the left with a bit of effort and went after the next limb. She watched as he dropped that one and stuck his tree-climbing spurs into the trunk to move upwards to the next one, higher up.

The screaming confused her. There was no one being harmed. There was no blood. There was no one lying on the ground. There was nothing to see but an aged tree being cut down. Suddenly, she understood. It was the tree. It had no defense. Its leaves were waving in the wind, but not enough to catch the attention of any defense attorney. And there was no one to advocate for it. Liza wanted to, but there was land ownership involved.

She started crying. She had noticed that tree from the day she had moved in. It had been one of her artsy ideas to take a picture of it each week of the year, from January to December, from the same spot on her backyard patio. Those photos would show week by week and season by season its winter, spring, summer, and fall splendor. It was a castle among the mundane homes of her neighborhood.

But right now, Liza was frozen. She stared until the man in the tree climbed down. He had dropped seven huge limbs. The upper half of the tree remained. The screams turned to whimpers. Liza sat back down and put her head in her hands. Why am I hearing this?

She loved the earth, and it loved her. It produced most of her food year-round, and she thanked it for this gift. She often felt like Skywoman falling through the hole in Skyworld. She had seen this woman, adapted from oral tradition, in Bruce King’s portrait, Moment in Flight. Skywoman had turned her new world from brown to green with the gifts of fruits and seeds she had brought with her. Liza always tended her gardens with this in mind. Maybe she was a descendant of Skywoman. The thought brightened her tears.

During the next fifteen minutes, the workers cut the limbs into sizes that people would use. They loaded some of them onto the pickup truck and added the small limbs and sticks that they had folded into a tarp onto the top of the pile. Before they left, they placed the remaining large fireplace-size pieces that were still lying on the ground in neat stacks at the base of the tree.

As they pulled away, Liza heard a scraping sound. She had often heard this sound when she found an abundance of worms in her compost bins. She looked out the window again and didn’t see anything, but the scraping got louder and louder. She wasn’t sure, but it sounded like the other trees further down the hill and those in her own yard were reaching out to the cut tree from their deep roots. As they all joined in, the rooting sound reached the peak of its crescendo, and she realized they were sending support to the cut tree. When they reached the tree, the scraping stopped. A different sound started, as if she were tying the laces on her work boots, but a thousand times louder. They were joining their roots in community with a traumatized member. Liza smiled. She was understanding things she never thought possible.

Liza watched the tree over the next few weeks, almost afraid to see how it would respond to this trauma. The flat surfaces where its limbs had been became darker, the tree’s equivalent of a scab, but overall, it looked like it would survive. She also did some research to determine which path she could take to further her knowledge of botany and biology. She had always gotten A’s in her botany courses in college, which she had taken to satisfy her science requirements. She had gotten C’s in her music courses, and she had been a music major. She should have listened at that point in time.

Every morning, she went out back, turned toward the tree, opened her arms wide to the earth, and listened. She heard nothing until a month later. That particular morning, she went to her spot at the edge of the patio and faced the tree. She shut her eyes, opened her arms, took a few big breaths, and listened. After a few seconds, she heard a strong voice say, “You have learned to listen. Don’t ever give up.” Liza gasped, sucked in the fresh morning air, and said quietly, “Thank you.”