Spruce

These majestic spruce trees, a Norway and a white (Picae abies and Picae glauca respectively), stand at the boundary between my yard and my neighbor's. Spruce is more dominant in the forests further north, but it can be found here in yards and at the edges of parking lots and other reconstructed places. Both trees grow a light, straight wood that, when found on timber company property, is used for pulpwood - relatives of these trees are in the newspaper you read this morning, and the reams of office paper you go through every day. These trees will not meet such fate as long as their roots grow under my property. The big one, the Norway, is home to a squirrel couple that has raised a few litters of young already. The white spruce has produced small but abundant cones this year. Squirrels love the seed of the white spruce above all others. The sqirrels have, in effect, built their home next to the supermarket. According to Berndt Heinrich, these trees are wonderful examples of the effects of climate on evolution. These trees are adapted to snow. Their branches are curved toward the sky, but are comprised of springy wood, thicker on the bottom of the branch than on the top, and can withstand bending nearly straight down, if nesessary. They do not resist the weight of snow, they absorb it, perfectly. Too much snow and the branches bend at an angle steep enough to drop it to the ground. You've seen it. The rest of the time, they stand, proud, majestic. Secure in their place at the edge of my yard, comfortable upon their plot of land. Useful to the living dynamics of this piece of fill between the Assabet spillway and the Assabet River. Life and home at once.

To see the general well-fittedness of things out there in that non-rational complex of living things is cause for concern. Here in our own constructions, fittedness is an increasingly elusive end. Indeed, it is not even an end at all in this country. To fit, one does not stand out. To not stand out is death among my people. Non-fittedness, then, has become our main social ambition. We talk a good talk - I think we have even convinced ourselves - and we keep the volume up persistently, drowning out any risk of hearing or seeing the real truth. But these opposing tendencies are cause for concern. The ambition of spectacular individualism stole the promise of a family from my childhood, so I am not partial to it. I have seen it rot the imaginations of otherwise great men and elevate base men to places of influence. The genius of democracy is its respect for the inexplicable general fittedness of things out there. The trouble with our current situation, is its singular focus on material gain - which is nothing other than the disassembling of fit, the deconstruction of the non-rational order of things. Not just more bombs, more deaths, more dead-end policies from a rotted and corrupt political order, but more seemingly benign offenses as well - volumes of plastics, buckets of lies. May we be like the spruce branches, springy enough to drop the burden of winter without breaking ourselves.