remembering   a backyard spruce    by JoAnne Growney	Will this spruce    be felled for paper,    become a poem?
*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     * remembering a backyard spruce   In 2003 when I returned to Bloomsburg from six weeks in Alaska, I  became  emphatically aware that my West Fourth Street house was too large for me.  In 2004 when my first granddaughters were born—in Virginia and in Maryland—the center of gravity of my family moved south from Pennsylvania. Though my old, frame Victorian with four levels and ten rooms had been ideal space for the sprawl of a family with four children and was wonderfully full again when a group of them visited, the balance of travel shifted from my home to theirs.   I began to think about leaving.   I looked around at what I would leave behind.  Not my friends.  I did not allow myself to think those links could loosen.  We would always connect.  But I would cease reading the Press-Enterprise on the wide front porch of the yellow house, cease to enter the red door to the foyer that led to a broad eighteen-step stairway up.   In the small yard behind the house stands a shaggy evergreen.  Planted during the Second World War, this tree had for years hidden behind the robust branching of a maple but it filled out when the maple became diseased and needed to be cut down.  I considered the tree—and decided to study it and remember.  It would stand for Bloomsburg.	remembering a backyard spruce (2)   Basho,* Japanese Haiku master, said:  “Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.”  I liked this idea.  I stopped searching for information on the Internet and in books.  I began to observe the tree.  And then to photograph.  Not surprisingly, each photo disappointed me—I am inexperienced with a camera and do not make best use of light, so the tree was fuzzy or dark or my clothes line stretched across in front.  I could not capture the tree.   Basho foreknew my difficulty.  Of Japanese cherry blossoms, he wrote:  “We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things.  Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.”   *The Essential Haiku:  Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa,  Ed., Robert Hass (NY:  HarperCollins, 1994, p. 233).   Here, then, are a few fragments:  some words and shadows of one of  Bloomsburg’s Norway Spruce.       JoAnne Growney, 2006
Photos to be added soon.	Morning  manifests  the spruce.    Backyard companion—  rooted and  flexile,  straight and alone.
	Young limbs reach for sun  but the weight of years  drags old limbs down.    Curled, mosaic bark :  red, orange, yellow—  colors of age.
	Wind gusts groom the spruce— and I clean up the droppings.   If spruce carpets had vacuum cleaners, they’d be noises eating needles.
	The Methodist church and the spruce both cast  a pointed shadow.    When I climb to high windows, my spruce seems higher too.
	A droplet sparkles at a needle’s tip— then falls.    A telephone line hangs near; the spruce listens to the squirrels.
	Cone jewels dangle   like a thousand earrings—   Listen.     A knotted sock   thrown to a branch by a boy—  a neighborhood flag.
	First to break  in a storm is the branch  heavy with cones.     A spruce is home  for mourning doves  that coo and go.
The heart of a spruce is unknown until it’s cut down.   ©2006 JoAnne Growney	Dark needles drab   in autumn sky—tomorrow   a crown of snow.    The midnight spruce  probes the Big Dipper   and feathers the moon. Back