The two of them, long married, play pick-up-sticks under the giant leafless tree each spring.
Come August, the cottonwood will darken their yard like the lowered palm-shadow of a bean- stalk giant, large and expansive over their back lawn. But, for now, it holds a tangle of squirrels bustling over the still-bare limbs in full view.
As my friend tells it, the squirrels wave-hop themselves mighty and fast out to the very tips of the branches, reach with their front paws toward the knobs of new growth, bend it toward their mouths, chew the soft part, then let the rest fall to the ground. They do this over and again. Sticks become a rain falling.
Scene I: northern Fort Collins, early morning, April. He rakes the sticks into small piles and she follows, filling buckets and buckets. The squirrels are heedless, hanging at the very edge of disaster seemingly careless, unafraid, reckless. Each year they cut their teeth on the taste of this new wood.
Scene II: The Bellvue Grange, night, April. Early greenhouse flowers dot the tables and root beer pools flat and sweet in plastic cups. The band has started and I’m tying a balloon around the wrist of a toddler. He’s already lost one to the roof and it sways there, hesitant, grooving.
The almost-teen-boys lean against the wall. Their jeans, too long and too loose, ride their thin hipbones as if in negotiation with quick growth.
My friends ask the boys to dance. Pretty women, mothers all, wink-eyed and full of humor, try to tug them into swivel and stomp. The boys glower, pleased and embarrassed, and throw glances of pretend-horror at the women’s willingness to touch hands, to sway. They pull away, one by one, tuck chins, slink off like shy, dark- eyed creatures seeking night, cover, invisibility.
After 10 minutes, I rise to check on them. I sneak out the back kitchen and peer into the dirt alley that runs all the way around the grange. Girls stand at one corner in a bunch, like dangerous flowers, thin-stemmed, glowing, the green attitude of sharp youth and brains and power rises around them.
At the other end of the alley come the boys. They make their way up the dirt slash as if casual, but not at all. They look at one another, the ground, the dark around them – anything but the girls. They kick puffs of fine dirt on one another, shove shoulders, tell tired jokes too loudly, then attempt to engage the girls in a rock war, a sword fight, a stick duel, chicken-chase.
The girls let them get just so close and then disappear around the corner shrieking, not sure if they are afraid. I pull my friend, the mother of a son, toward the doorway in cahoots. “Look at them,” I say.
It continues at each corner of the building – round and round they go – the boys close in on the girls, the girls take off in lead and the mothers peer, wondering at this dance that begins before any of us are ready.
Our children suddenly seem surrounded by nothing but the exhilaration of sticks and air. We wonder at them hanging at the very edge, seemingly reckless and reaching.
Here it comes: the ascension of spring.
Stand under any mammoth cottonwood in Old Town Fort Collins, watch the squirrels hang, precarious, risky, a twinge away from falling. Stand in any alley, watch the boys hunch with self- consciousness, watch the girls practice the roll of their shoulders. Watch the risk, how they all move into it, as if drawn by some flicker of growth, of excitement, of movement.
We are each promised the hard cut of new birth and budding, of squirrels without the cover of deep leaf playing their stick games, of discovery.
And, we are promised the hard edge of a truth every day: Anything can change at any moment. Any high ascension, any risk, any new growth, can bring us crashing down.
Rise anyway all your life long. Move to the end of the limb and dance.
