There’s a beach where I sing Cohen’s Anthem to the seals, the chorus anyway, about cracks letting in light, the perfection of imperfection. I’m pretty sure that’s what the seals are singing too.

But this post isn’t about seals.

It’s about trees, which is part of the reason I’ve been inconsistently present for the better part of a year,

I’ve been wandering among what’s left of the them ever since Hurricane Fiona struck the east coast, when the island is said to have lost 40% of its trees on that single day in September, 2022.

Much has changed about the landscape since, not to mention the shoreline, not to mention the bridges, wharves, barns and houses demolished. The everywhere piles of timber have become a testament to the art of log stacking.

I’ve been wandering in what’s left of wandering space in the forest around my house, initially dazed, less so each time. We’ve done mammoth cleanups and have begun to cut a few new trails but we’re taking our time. I realize I don’t need a whole forest to wander through in order to feel awe.

There is new sunlight, saplings too, and mossy glades have sprung up among the still standing spruce and eastern larch (tamarack), the maple and birch, groves of beech, mountain ash, serviceberry, alder and aspen.

The other day I counted eight or nine new oak trees I’d never seen before. A few days after that I saw twenty on the same walk. This morning I stopped counting. This is the way of trees, I realize, the slow reveal of them. A forest at a glance is… green space. Up close it’s an unending universe.

Just the other day, at the edge of the tree line, I found two new apple trees, each a great distance from the other. One I call the galette tree for its tiny perfect fruit, tart enough for galettes, one of the few things I enjoy baking, precisely because the crust wants to be imperfectly shaped.

The old linden beside the house was perfectly shaped, but also imperfect because it had grown so large it almost touched the hydro lines and a month or so ago when another hurricane threatened, and because the direction of the forecasted winds (different than Fiona’s) would force the tree’s branches right onto the power lines, we took no chances, and had it cut down. I expected to be sad, pained even, but it wasn’t in the least painful, not a bit sad. There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.

Now every morning I salute these stumps and the space once filled with the old linden’s canopy, thank it for its willingness to continue standing despite (we realized) rotting from the middle and something eating its leaves, for making it easy to do what was necessary, and for the light its absence allows.

The other day in my ramblings along the tree line, I noticed among the ‘greenery’ a tiny grove… of linden saplings.

What else to say…

Here’s to the cracks and the light.

Ring all the bells.