The Tree and the Hawk

Over sixty years ago my wife and I moved to the hill country town of Nashville, Indiana. It is about sixteen miles from the city of Bloomington and Indiana University. About once a week we would journey to Bloomington for entertainment or shopping or to do laundry.
When we began making our first trips I noticed a nearly perfectly formed oak tree in the center of a farmer’s bottom-land field. I would frequently see a red-tailed hawk resting on the sag between two poles of a power line near this same location.

As the years progressed the tree reached maturity and was a marker I looked for on frequent trips to Bloomington. About ten years ago the tree was ravaged by a windstorm which took down significant limbs changing its symmetry. More recently a lightning strike demolished about half the tree killing it. The remaining portion stood like an apple sliced in half.

Subsequent storms have left standing a grotesque, bare, leaning remnant, poised as if waiting for someone to place a cushion to soften its final fall. Recently I noticed a hawk on the top-most branch of the tree. I wonder if the hawk realizes that one day this perch will no longer be there. Did the hawk and the tree have a symbiotic relationship? Is the hawk aware that I look for it every time I drive by and that I miss it when it is not there?

The tree and I have aged together. I no longer have the symmetry of my younger days. Like the tree I have been weathered by the ravages of time. I’ve had some falls but manage to get up bruised but hobbled to remain standing. If the tree goes first I will miss my long-standing relationship with it. I think of us as old friends, one of the first we made when we first came to the region and have grown up together. I wonder if the hawk will miss the tree too. Whichever goes first, the hawk and the tree will never know that their presence added to the quality of my day each time I observed them. Or will they? Or does it matter?

I wonder why the farmer left this sapling standing when his purpose was to make the field tillable. As he cut the limbs for firewood and burned the stumps, why was this one tree left behind? Was there something about its symmetry even then causing him to spare it? Did he think that one day he might pasture the field and have cows? It would give them shade on a hot summer day. Maybe he was tired that day and left it standing thinking he would cut it another day? We will never know his reason.

We often make decisions based on reasons no greater than a whim never realizing they may affect others in the generations that follow. We all leave behind our footprints in the morning dew. Only the early risers can trace where they may lead if they so choose.