The Language of Trees Read Online Free

bloody. But he opens the screen door to let the air wash his face clean of these thoughts. At once, he’s caught by the hiss of wind sweeping over leaves as it rushes in from the head of Canandaigua Lake.
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    O UTSIDE, THE EARTH IS cold and wet under his bare feet. The sun is beginning to spray hints of lacquer across the lake. Ahead, an old birch has fallen into the water. Grant steps carefully onto the smooth trunk, pacing farther and farther as though the lake were pulling him toward its center. He has always felt things in his body first, his mind taking longer to catch up. Sometimes the intensity of the feeling has propelled him into action. Other times, it has paralyzed him.
    Grant can feel the soul of the old tree beneath his feet, ceaseless and forgiving, knowing it has only itself to blame, never having settled its roots deep enough into the rocky ground. He moves forward as waves crash against the breakwall, their frothing crest swelling back as the water underneath rushes forward. Does he have a right to anything more than a few moments of clarity?
    If he can just get out there near the fallen tree. There, a bit farther, where the trout are dancing.
    Grant is suddenly aware of the scent of a dying bonfire trickling in from up shore. He looks up. A heron is standing on the dock a few feet away, its narrow head tucked between itsshoulders. Its ember eyes are motionless. This bird’s meditative quiet reminds him of something he has lost. Every morning after carving, Grant walks out to the dock to join the herons in their perfect stillness. Years ago, the heron’s lightning speed awed him as it speared its prey. Now it’s the bird’s patience that impresses him.
    He glances back at the screened-in porch in the front of the cabin, which looks small and dark, with its rough graying wood, wide broken window, and slatted sunken roof that may not withstand another winter. It looks safe somehow, huddled under the trees.
    He’ll throw himself into fixing up the cabin. Hadn’t his father rebuilt his mother’s kitchen four times in the years after she died? That was the way his father dealt with loss. It was then that Grant saw how human beings needed a way to put their hands on grief, to hold it as though it were the lost loved one. Grant was twenty-three when his mother passed, and after years, he still hadn’t gotten over his breakup with Echo O’Connell.
    He had listened outside his parents’ bedroom door to his father’s muffled sobs over the loss of his mother, to the footsteps pacing back and forth, sometimes until dawn.
    Each day Grant stood motionless as his father wore his grief deep into the wooden floorboards. As Grant placed his hands on the door, he could actually feel them going numb. Later, Grant would creep downstairs into his father’s dark study, where light slithered through the blinds and across the shelves lined with animal carvings, and across the dust-heavy desk, circling the stethoscope, and the pencil case, which always held freshly sharpened pencils, tips up, along with one tall feather, and then around the mahogany-framed photograph of his mother smiling sideways at someone Grant had always imagined was himself, though he did not remember it. Grant sat in his father’s high-backed chair, just as he had done as a child, trying to position his head so that it fit into the impression of his father’s head. He would stare at his father’s black doctor’s bag on the floor in the corner. Then, he’d close his eyes and wait for the scene to become clearer, that of his mother waving from way out in the water, and his father’s six-foot, six-inch giant frame walking toward her right into the lake until only the back of his head could be seen. Panicked, Grant had rubbed the worn velvet over the arms just as he had seen his father do after his mother became ill, to hold on to every piece of her, even the skin and the prints.
    His