In the stark middle of a winter’s night I lie awake, listening to the fall of trees.
It is Advent—mid-December—and rain has come to northwest Missouri where I live, a sprawling mass of moisture out of the south is being lifted along the blade of a cold front slicing down from Nebraska. It should be bringing snow, as it usually does this late in the year, adding several inches to what’s already on the ground. Further north in Iowa the snow is falling fast. Here in Missouri, though, it comes as rain.
An hour ago I was still roaming the house, peering out the windows at the rain and the trees that cloak the house. It's been raining since yesterday, falling through the wedge of freezing air over the town, glazing the trees. I went to bed after midnight, but couldn't sleep. I know what’s coming.
First, the sharp snaps of smaller branches punctuating the silence. Brutal silence. Forced silence. Broken tree silence. The silence of rain--and of death. Freezing rain sheathes the branches like sheer, clinging nylon until the weight breaks them off. The breaking of the larger ones sound like gunshots barking over the hardened glaze of snow-cover. Then from my bed I hear the shhhhhhhhhhhh of shattered ice falling like the slide of small stones down the polished steel bed of a dump truck. I tense, waiting for the deeper crack of the trunks. There's a large ash tree that arches over the southeast corner of our house. If it falls it will crush the south roof directly above me. With that thought, I get out of bed and head back downstairs.
It goes on, this night, until morning light slivers in through blinds and I am awake and outside checking the damage. The yard is littered with branches small and large but to my relief there are no fallen trees except for the mulberry on the north side of the house, which has been bowed to the ground in my neighbor’s back yard. It's a tree that I love, but its nearness to the house has caused us annoyances over the years: Its fast-growing stems leverage their way under shingles and slap and rattle against the siding in the wind and the stark, street-light shadows of its bare winter branches on my son’s bedroom window shade used to frighten him when he was a young boy. But in warmer seasons birds loved the mulberry and sang cheerily from her branches of a morning. Now her spine is curved and cracked, broken branches like bedraggled hair matted on a cold floor.
In the afternoon I take a drive around the town. Others are out like me, looking around, all a bit dazed, glazed, dazzled by the sun shining on the translucent ice. With all the broken tops of trees jutting into the sky, the town looks like it has been shelled. There isn’t any electrical power, but the houses are all intact and so are the people. The trees, too, will survive—those that haven’t fallen. New branches will grow. The leaves will return. In the measure of things, we’ve been inconvenienced, that’s all. Nature took most of the punishment.
I return home and stand in my back yard, looking around me, waiting. In this pause before the rumble of electrical repair trucks and the snarl of chain saws breaks in there is a silence that is at once both ordinary and profound. This is Advent, after all: A season of waiting--of anticipation--for the coming of the Christ child. I like this time. Silence seems right for it instead of the frenetic noise of December in America.
