Looking at Forest Floor Arthropods

I took a Forest Biology class a couple terms ago which inspired this essay of thoughts and wonder at our amazing, complex, and beautifully strange world:

Among moss and tree and sloughing bark a gossamer shred of spiderweb holds the waxy skeleton of an arthropod mite. What naked eye cannot see lives and lived in ancient dirt; they are the weight of quintillion arthropods breeding and spinning under foot of animal and man.

There are sounds in the forest; a chorus of singing and hissing of falling limb or lichen or needle; who knows the sounds only arthropods hear as hour by hour ancient trees rain down food – the arthropods’ manna from heaven.

To disassemble and recycle the earth, the arthropods eat the ground and feed the birds and die every 18 hours for man to live. Do the arthropods below know the space above, in air, in light, the giant trees which tower over their alien heads? I prefer biologic thinking about the earth created – to bring God to the dirt to see the arthropods living out the sex and drama of predator and prey.

In the forest, the wind is a gentle, moving affair of trees making love. Below, deep in the moist earth, a female spider devours the head of her lover. Her house drinks the snow and drip from fog, to quench the thirst of the hardened ticks and razor jawed mites. We breath because arthropods live below us as a horror picture.

They live in houses of tissue, tiny factories of jaws and guts and heartwood swimming in fecal matter. Strange, the fauna of arthropods on the forest floor, a painted canvas of the world as odd and ordered and neatly arranged in mud.
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Mother

My writing always come back to her. I can’t leave this moment in my mind – the day my mom was buried. It haunts me. I’ve written about it from many different perspectives. This is a new one. Not every detail is exactly the way it happened – it is more a piece of my emotions – the way the moment felt for me as a child.

Mother,

I was twelve years old when you were buried. A winter storm drew shadows above the heads of mourners. The smell of wet dirt and dead trees lingered among the crowd dressed in long church coats. My father wore a red tie. It was the only color between the sky and the black road winding through the cemetery. It reminded me of the blood you coughed up the night before you died, the violent way it entered our world. I never knew him before that day you traded places, but I watched his breath rise like smoke as he exhaled the dead air, releasing the winter ghost who haunted the abandoned trees.

I couldn’t see the faces of the mourners, only the way the black clouds formed veils over the freshly dug dirt. I remember the tapping of the branches as they moved in the wind. It seemed the trees were the only presence surrounding me, and the mist rising from the earth filled the air with a thick and unmovable silence.

My father said the burial was brief - a short prayer under the snow. The moment is not suspended in his memory the way it is in mine. Your death to him was God’s will – a thing unknowable and mysterious. I hated God’s will, as I hated winter, and that red tie.

Your sister recalls taking me home after we said goodbye to you. She didn’t understand I no longer had a home – she couldn’t see the two worlds I stood between, the one with you in it, and the one without. She doesn’t remember the red tie, or the way the winter ghost moved darkly through the trees. She didn’t see the snow falling in my unbuckled Sunday shoe as you were lowered in the ground. They never noticed my miss-buttoned dress coat, or the way my satin ribbon came undone and tumbled in the wind, toward you.
Copyright ©

I'm back!

I don't know what happened, but my blog was deleted (by accident). I'm sad that I lost all my other writings, but I guess sometimes it helps to have a clean start.

Unfortunately I have two finals on Monday which I need to study for, but I thought I would let everyone know I'm back.

Ci vediamo subito!

Amanda