The steep hill before me winds up, up, up to a great house on a hill. Of course, the lawn is crawling, lumbering with oaks, leaning against one another, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder. Some stand alone. Some are grand and others are leggy. I can hear them distantly as you hear a storm off on the horizon.

The greatest oak is gnarled and it sits the very highest on the hill. It’s branches coil upward like thick plumes of black smoke that do not trail off, tapering into fine electric points, and ending abruptly with a pop. The leaves have not yet seeped out of the buds, though they are swelling with the developing cells and auxins packed inside. I can see the story unfolding in the deep furrows of bark, like mountain ridges being crunched up from the earth’s crust, drafted from somewhere deep in soil. The big tree draws everything upward. The tree draws me upward, my head tilts backward like a satellite, the big tree always draws us upward. So we go.

Moving upward, we are both respiring. There are small explosions within each of us as bonds are broken between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. A hard breath feels quite good. In each furnace, the constant consummation of energy is rolling on like a train under a Christmas tree. It is like Shigo’s pump that requires constant motion. Unplug it and the lights go out. So when we climb we are humming this tune along with the tree, like a polyphony, an a cappella in the woods.

In the top of the tree I can see far across the valley for miles. A row of windmills like fence posts, a water tank, a hospital, a brewery are situated in my view. Miles away. I study a small twig close by, four years in not as many inches; slow accumulation, the way an icicle forms, or the way an anthill is built with a constant busyness untethered to the world of windmills. But the wind rushes over everything eventually and makes us all whorl and spin.

Swinging through branches like the woodpecker flies, a few thrusts of its wings and then tucked away like an egg hurling through a hallway, short falling arches; a stone skipping over water. Landing, the branch bending like a guitar string on a low blues note. Held together by the tight bonds of things hard to see packed together like jellybeans and straws and chewed gum.

From up here I can see all the trees below on the hill rolling up to me, swaying, dancing, laughing. Moving forever in one place as the wind rolls through.