It has become that time of evening where I should probably wash my face and/or go to sleep, but I’ve got other things on my mind.

My mom told us far-flung siblings via email that the two old apple trees across the driveway from the farmhouse are going to have to be cut down. Some sizable limbs have collapsed over the years, but now things are getting dangerous and beyond repair. There is rot, and branches cracking under the weight of too much fruit. There’s something sad about that: you can domesticate a plant and prune it to be productive, but let it go and it might produce itself to death. I don’t know if they’ve been pruned properly for the last few years, so I can’t say what exactly is going on. For a long time, that was my job, but I haven’t been around for a while. Trees have a life span, I suppose.

As I child, I wanted everything to be old. I remember reading Boxcar Children books about hidden passageways and long-lost Revolutionary War rifles and secret rooms and wishing mightily that I might have the good fortune to come across some dusty old secret. The construction date of the house where I grew up was written on the window well by the front steps: 1954. It wasn’t long before I realized how not-old that is. No houses built in 1954  have matchlock guns hidden under the floorboards, or a secret door that’s been wallpapered over to hide a painful secret. This being Washington, there would be no trapdoors behind the holly bushes in the backyard that covered an old hideout for fugitive slaves. Even the furniture was young: I don’t come from antique-collecting stock. The closest I ever came to hidden treasure was finding some old wedding invitations in the attic, fallen between the studs.

And then you get older and begin to understand that this house was built by flesh-and-blood construction workers and even the darkest, most distant corner of the attic was out in the open breathing sunshine before they put the siding on. You begin to understand that your grandparents emptied the attic before your parents filled it, and that there’s just no chance of some forgotten trunk full of treasure being stowed away out of sight in the dark. You begin to understand how things fit together, and it takes away what mystery your were able to sum up as a kid.

I know that these apple trees are not much different from the old apple trees on any number of other farms in the county. They’re a common feature, and most of them look about as old and gnarled as mine. I remember loving those trees partly because they were the oldest things I could see, and I couldn’t imagine away their years. I could picture them having been ancient when my grandparents bought the farm in the sixties, when everything in old photos was impossibly grassy and wild. I could imagine them back when Phoebe Judson sailed up the Nooksack in a canoe, somehow grown up neatly on an east-west axis just south of the valley, waiting to share their fruit with the settlers. What I couldn’t do was imagine them as young trees. I couldn’t squint away the years and see a couple of saplings. They were eternally old.

I can’t reason away the mystery of those apple trees, even now. I don’t want to know how old they are, or who planted them, but even so, I don’t think it would make any difference. I am thankful for those trees and the connection to history that they gave me, no matter how delusional. I am thankful for the friendly branch on the easternmost tree that allowed it to be easily climbed. I am thankful for their water sprouts which made such excellent whips and seemed to show up in the oddest places. I am thankful for their apples, which my mom alchemized into jars of applesauce beyond number. I am thankful for the sound and smell of the dehydrator when it was making apple chips, a smell which made the basement feel warmer. I am thankful for my weird, amalgamated memory of coming home from school on a sunny afternoon in September or October, of running down the steps of the bus and across the field towards the house through the dead grass and flourishing hawksbeard and then the bright, patchy red of windfall Kings and, finally, into the house. Into the house to leave a pile of backpacks, a pile of papers, a lunchbox full of empty Ziplocs on the counter, to find monkey bread cooling in the middle of the kitchen table, and, sometimes, my mom, coring and peeling apples.

I am a tree person. I love a handful of cottonwoods, several maples, aspens wherever I find them. I love those apple trees. They were a blessing on my childhood, and I will miss them.

I was, through some Facebook rabbit-holing, listening to the Esenvalds anthem from an Evensong service archived on the Trinity College Choir website, and then it kicked over to one of the most beautiful congregational prayers I’ve heard in some time.

http://www.trinitycollegechoir.com/webcast/16052013-choral-evensong/

This is a gift: my little brother drove down to Seattle this evening to go to a Sam Amidon concert with me. It was a small crowd at the Sunset, and most of us were drinking tallboys of PBR and maybe nodding our heads a little to much. It felt rare and special and also basic and ordinary. We might as well have been in someone’s basement, friends listening to friends. Near the end we all lifted our voices and sang, together, the words of the great folk poet R. Kelly:

“What a relief to know that we are one / What a relief to know that the war is over / What a relief to know that there’s an angel in the sky / What a relief to know that love is still alive.”

It was a good concert.

The end of the school year is less than three weeks away, and I bounce back and forth between feeling like I haven’t taught my students anything and just wanting to be done already. Some colleagues tell me that this is a common feeling, wanting both more time and less time with your students, feeling like you’ve wasted four months of their lives teaching pop songs (which you swore you’d never do) in an attempt to still their adolescent bodies and failing to get the entire group to sing a legato four-bar phrase without breathing in the middle. You talked too much, you didn’t teach a lot of sight-singing (for which your college professors would crucify you), your kids can’t follow through a piece with multiple first and second endings to save their lives, let alone a d.s. al coda. Some of them still consistently struggle to match pitch unless you remind them to sing softer and listen what is wrong with you? I’ve told you a million times and shut up and face the front and stop talking during the middle of rehearsal.

Self-judgement comes easy to me. Healthy self-evaluation, not so much, though I’m trying, and am supported in my efforts by a truly phenomenal group of colleagues. And when it all comes down to it, I’m happiest for selfish reasons: I have kids now. Not in the way that I imagined (i.e. there aren’t 150 of them and they don’t clamor to sing choral repertoire), but I have kids, and I don’t think that they would be ashamed of me saying that. And I think that this is what keeps people coming back. I know that I can become a better teacher and, if not magically turn things into a Hallmark card in every class, at least feel more confident that I’m not the one that’s causing the problems. I suppose I’m looking forward to that next year, which is maybe part of the reason why I’m ready for this one to be finished. And I think that I know that I’ll disappoint myself to some degree in September when things fall apart and it’s sort of all my fault. But I have kids. My students. That’s pretty fantastic.

I am in my sleeping bag, lying on the couch on the balcony. There are some candles burning on the ledge, augmented by the security lights in the parking lot. Sam Amidon is singing about a short life of trouble through the open windows. A batch of cold brewed coffee steeps on the counter (one and a half gallons!) and the nasturtiums I planted are all scrabbling towards the light like sunflowers. Like any sort of plant, I guess. The people passing through the parking lot don’t know I’m here, which makes me feel devious and secretive. There is a breeze blowing in the trees, but I don’t know what kind of trees they are. Some kind tall.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about specific places I loved, and what was going on there at the moment. For example, there was (and continues to be, for all I know) a tractor tire that rested on a gravelly slope above a meadow at the campground we used to visit when I was younger. It was surrounded by aspens, and, by some odd result of landscaping waste dumping, purple bearded irises. It was on the edge of what I assume is a staging area for the campground, a place to store gravel or haul logs to be chopped up and split. Your back is to all of that when you sit on the tire, though: the aspens tower above, a spray of irises on either side and the yellow meadow before you. There is the sound of the aspens, too.

So I would think, often in my bed, trying to fall asleep, about the tire, the irises and the aspens. Was it raining right then? Warm? Cool? Breezy? Was the moon out? If so, was it full? What’s hiding in the shadow inside the tire? Could you tell the irises were purple in that light? If not, what did they look like? Was someone else sitting there? I remember feeling similarly about the campsites we would use: they were ours, we understood how to set them up, where to park the campers and pitch the tents, and the idea of other people using them seemed impossible. I guess it’s like thinking about someone else living in your space after you’ve gone.

I went for a walk with my Mom and sister last Sunday, and as we were walking down the road I grew up on (both address-wise and, it seems to me now, literally), I was pleased to see that the honeysuckle were in bloom. I don’t remember when I first noticed them – it was after junior year of high school, which is when I first learned what they were, while eating a frozen raspberry cheesecake from a bakery just outside Leavenworth – but ever since, I’ve always kept an eye on them. They grow in two spots along the road, on the edge of the woods where their foliage blends in and they can be hard to spot. They’re natural, as far as I know, but I don’t know if anyone else notices them. My mom and sister hadn’t, although they know now. It makes me sad to think I’m the only one.

There is something about beautiful summer evenings in Washington that makes my heart stop. I was driving back from a friend’s house this afternoon while the sun was setting, and just before I crossed over into Montlake, I could feel the light, saw it caught on the drawbridge towers, and for a moment, everything stopped.

Sunset memories: running through a cornfield in barn boots and shorts, falling out of a willow tree, laying on my back in a field under “my” cottonwood tree, injecting, raking, tilling, delivering dinners on a four-wheeler, playing tennis, running over the Scott Ditch, honeysuckle, taking a photo of a semi on an overpass, climbing the silo. Doing silage. Church league softball. Stopping for gas on road trips and feeling the heat in the pavement. Fire pits, campfires, waiting until it was dark enough for fireworks. Eating raspberry puree with runny homemade ice cream. Putting on a jacket even when it’s still warm enough to go without.

When we went camping with the extended family every year after school was out, I remember looking forward to the couple of hours after dinner (marinated chicken breasts, red potatoes, green beans, soupy paper plates, plastic-handles utensils) while it was still light. We would sometimes swim, if it was warm enough, or play mini golf, since usually the mosquitos would have quieted a little. Or a bike ride. Or a walk. Tennis, although the limited visibility did nothing to boost our limited skills. Hang out doing puzzles in the lodge until you stumbled back to the campsite, catching gravel in your flip flops, and tried to wedge your way in around the fire.

Today, Father Lex said something that caught my attention. Referring to Revelation 21, he made the point that not only will God wipe away all of our tears, but he will also wipe away the tears that we have caused others to shed.

– Today I sang the narration to Luke’s Passion during the morning service. Other soloists took care of Pilate and the two thieves, while the choir and congregation sang the part of the angry mob and of Jesus. This astonishes me, and I don’t quite know what to make of it, that we speak the words of both parties. During rehearsal and in the service, I almost started weeping up there in the pulpit. I’m not sure if it was the power of the story, or the power of so many people claiming it and wrestling with it. 

– During coffee hour, a woman whom I understand to be homeless took a nearly-full pitcher of half-and-half, added a few tablespoons of coffee, and walked away, drinking. I almost interrupted her, assuming she was making an absent-minded mistake, but then, judging by her clothing, realized that perhaps she needed it. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I wasn’t sure whether she didn’t belong, or whether the rest of us didn’t belong.

– I’ve been thinking a lot about the audacity of going to church. As Annie Dilard says, “..as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God.”  And at the same time, who else is there? I felt that way in the pulpit. I felt that way watching that woman drink a pitcher of cream. There is no one here but us.

– This is perhaps unrelated, but perhaps not:

Marilynne Robinson, for the nth time, gave me pause this morning:

“Woman,” Jesus, when he had lived and died, said or would have said, using a word perhaps not used so gently since Adam was a gardener — “Woman, why weepest thou?” Mary Magdalene could hear this as the question of a kindly stranger, but it means, in fact, There is no more cause for weeping. It means, perhaps, God will wipe away all tears. “Who seekest thou?,” a question of the same kind, means, She need not look farther. To Jesus, or to the writer whose account renders what he took to be implicit in the moment, these questions might be wider altogether, full of awe. How did sorrow enter the world? What would be the nature of comfort or of restitution? The scene we are given answers its own questions, and does not answer them at all . . . We are told that, in the days before death and sorrow, God walked of an evening in the garden he had made, that he saw his likeness in the gardeners, that he spoke with them. What can these strange stories mean? After so much time and event and so much revelation, the mystery is only compounded.

So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

I can’t say that I’ve been captivated by every page of “The Death Of Adam” (nor can I speak to the ten pages missing from my copy), but please get your hands on a copy and read “Psalm Eight” as quickly as you can.