Tomorrow is my birthday! Let’s do this, 36!
I’m working on a mix of a new song right now that I’m hoping to upload to my music page tomorrow! It’ll be a special birthday release, and I’m going to make it available for exactly one month. The song is called “Snow Moon”, and it’s a love song to the full moon in the month of February, which will be happening – you guessed it – tomorrow! I get a full moon for my birthday, which means YOU get a new song! I’ll update the blog tomorrow with the link to get that new, very limited release, so watch this space!
The weirdest thing happened a week ago. My mother’s giant read oak tree, whose canopy absolutely covered her back yard and has done so since well before I was born, pivoted into a heretofore unknown hole beneath its roots, and very gracefully fell into the yard. This was the biggest tree I’d ever seen for about half my life, and it’s at least 175 years old, according to our arborist friend who came to see it to tell us what he could. I was very glad I’d already planned to come and visit my mother for the weekend. We’ve been keeping a sort of vigil together, she and I, as the tree gets visits from arborists and insurance adjusters. The tree hit her lawnmower shed and left some gouges in the yard where it landed, but miraculously it did not hit anything else- not the fence, not the dogs, not the house. It occurred to me when I saw this with my own eyes that, perhaps when you live for so long and grow to be so tall, you have lots of time to plan the way that you’ll fall.
…Yeah, the song pretty much writes itself. So I’m likely to write an ode to this tallest friend of my childhood pretty soon. There’s no stopping it, really. Here’s a shot I posted on Instagram. You can kind of get a sense of the size of this oak, but it still doesn’t do it justice. I want to thank everybody who’s sent condolences since I posted this image and told a bit of the tree’s story on social media. It really has been like losing a friend. I believe in dryads. This tree definitely had a spirit all its own. I will miss it very much. I will miss its shade and its presence.