"The maples were an outpost for red-tailed hawks scanning the fallow fields for food, and for crows meeting to discuss the day’s business. They were home to families of squirrels, who would race down their trunks and across the road, toward the farm and the woods and brook beyond. Particularly in the summer, when they were plush with foliage, the trees softened the lines and angles of their surroundings—tidy rows of planting fields, pitched roofs of barns and houses, the straight black ribbon of asphalt that insists itself upon the terrain. The girth of their trunks said they had been present to generations of humans, animals, birds, plants. Theirs was a living history no human record could approximate. Their presence helped define that landscape for me. Now their stumps are weathered to a steely grey, but their absence can still feel as fresh as the first day I found they were gone. My mind continues to see them where they were, as they were—in anticipation or memory or denial—until I round the bend and see the open sky."
~from "Too Much Sky" by Kristin Flyntz, as published in Issue 17 "Bodies In and Out of Place". Read the whole essay at: https://darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com/jan2024/too-much-sky/
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