It was very windy yesterday, so instead of biking home along the river, I decided to take a detour through the park, which was beautiful in the late-afternoon light.
As usual, it wasn't too crowded.
When I go in the morning, the other people in the park look motivated. They are running, walking briskly, and doing group stretches. There are many dog walkers. They have busy days in front of them.
On this Friday afternoon, however, people seemed very relaxed. There were a few older couples, tottering along holding on to each other's arms, and a few couples dressed in black who looked like they had just woken up and, after having their coffee, were now taking a (for them) morning stroll.
I was looking forward to the day when I was no longer injured and could rejoin the morning ranks, but at this second, the afternoon rotation didn't seem so bad.
I was enthralled by the yellow magnolia.
And the old entrance that was built when this land was a private estate. It doesn't seem like billionaires these days are interested in doing more than sustaining a plutocracy rooted in white supremacy, the unsustainable extraction of natural resources, the subjugation of women, and minimal taxation. Instead of spending forty billion dollars to ruin Twitter, Elon Musk could have built a greenway along the Harlem River. When will the rich realize that, without a functional society, their wealth means nothing?
Mounds of heather stretched toward the sun.
Despite being surrounded by beauty, I felt uneasy. Everyone knows that death comes in threes, and so far this spring, I had experienced two, the death of my father and the death of our cat, Zephyr. What would the third one be?
Maybe it was the clematis that didn't make through the winter, although that didn't seem meaningful enough to count (to me, anyway: I'm sure it mattered to the clematis).
I went to the north end of the heather garden to say hello to one of my favorite trees, and there I found my answer.
The tree, a small dogwood, was gone. I had probably taken ten thousand pictures of this tree, and now it was just a stump.
If there's a heaven for trees, I hope it made it there.
And I hope that one day, I make it there, too.
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