What Have I Forgotten to Say?
I am now, just now, looking to ease out of the square hole the round peg too big for that hole that I have spent decades hammering into the hole. Now, I set down my rubber mallet. I bow to it, both thanking it and forgiving it for the necessary and unnecessary labor we did together. I rub my calloused, blistered hands. I look at them and feel such compassion for them. “I am sorry, dear hands, for making you labor for so long in an endeavor that was not what you were meant to be doing.” I carefully rub into my hands a salve with lavender and calendula, and I realize that it will take some time for the blisters to heal before I can take up another tool. So I sit, and I look at the round peg jammed halfway into the square hole, with its edges at the lip of the hole splintered and worn, and I contemplate how I will ease it out.
No immediate solution comes to mind, and so I walk. The hole, I see, has been bored into the bark of a redwood tree, and I feel regretful that I never realized that. I have no idea who made the hole. I can only remember the feeling of the task that was mine, to hammer my peg into it. So, I step back, and look at the redwood, and step further back and see that I am in a still, deep grove of redwoods. I walk, slowly, quietly, and my footfalls are silenced by the thick carpet of needles on the forest floor. I notice the redwoods that have been hollowed out by forest fires centuries ago—caverns deep enough to sit inside, to keep poultry inside, the inner walls a deep, deep cinder black, the scar stretching up above my head. And yet, the redwood lives, towering above me much higher than the fire scar.
I walk back to the redwood with my peg driven into it, like a stake into the heart of the tree, and I bow. My hands have healed somewhat, but not completely, and that's OK, because they have gentler work to do now. I take the same salve I used on my hands and I work it gently into the crevice where the swollen, splintered peg meets the wounded tree, and I gently begin to turn the peg. This takes many days, and many applications of salve. Each day, the peg turns a bit more, and eases out of the tree a bit more. As it eases out, I am noticing the few birds that visit the redwood grove, and the sorrel and ferns that grow alongside it.
At last, one day, the peg eases completely out and rests in my hand. I look at it, and I feel grief, to see how twisted and misshapen it became with all the years of pounding. I look at the hole and feel sorrow at the pain that I caused to the tree. I'm not really sure anymore which of these, peg or tree, was me, my labor, my life.
I'm not sure what to do next, and so I gently carry the peg in my hands out of the grove, and into a meadow. I feel as though I am carrying a dead child, and now I feel somehow the spirit of that first child in me that did not quicken, that would be almost 20 years old now. How strange to think of her now, in this moment. I seldom do, though when I do, I always think of her as my daughter, the daughter I never had. In the middle of the meadow, it feels right to crouch down, dig a hole, and bury the peg in the ground, surrounded by grasses and butterflies and daisies and bright orange wild poppies.
I sit there longer and many more days pass, and to my surprise, I see the tiny sprigs of a tree begin to emerge from where I planted the peg. I have no idea what kind of tree it will become. I will need to sit here and wait. I am content to watch and wait.