the fourteenth of july

In the evening, while the sun was still sitting low and golden in the sky, I packed some things: a quilt, a book of thoughts both deep and nonsensical, a drink, my camera, and my journal. I often used to go to the graveyard a few blocks from my parents house, where there, waiting for me, was a tall lady willow tree, strong and beautiful, sad and hunkered over with limbs of grace and humility. I used to go there to sit, to read, to write, to sing, to pray, to think and to wonder.
I walked toward the graveyard, where only the silent lay still; My anticipation to meet my willow again was great. But the townspeople cut her down. They plucked her from the soil that made the earth her home.
I nearly cried for my tree. I carried on walking, but only in deep sadness.
Instead of the graveyard, I chose to place myself in the soccer field -- the bleak and open soccer field, where men with silver crowns groaned and grunted as they played their tennis sport, and where unruly pre-pubescent boys kicked a soccer ball in all the wrong directions.
It's a funny thing, though, that as I crossed the river bridge and landed on this soccer field, I was greeted not by a willow, but by an elderly maple whose arms swept down low, as if they were inlove with the grass and simply wanted to be close to it.
I instantaneously chose this tree and spread my quilt under its swooping canopy.
Though it was no lady willow tree, it was there and it was beautiful and old.

And perhaps that soccer field was exactly where I needed to be.