On Labor Day, using a borrowed shovel whose history I did not know, I planted a tree. It was a young, slight thing meant to grow as our daughter grows, to shade her as she dances.
As I dug into the earth, I saw the past. Going down, I pulled up bricks and gravel and all manner of forgotten matter. Someone else had put it there long ago. I do not know who put those things there, but I know they stood in that spot hoping to build something, as I was (in a sense), that would last.
I saw more than just the past. My imagination clung to the branches of the tree and was pulled up to see the coming years. I could see my daughter there, a full-woman. Surrounded by her friends, a circle of women together, they were laughing.
“Oh,” our full-grown little one was saying, “When I was a child there was this tree….”
I put my back into the labor again and built a mound of moved earth against the planks of the backyard fence, a testimony to just how deep these things go.
None of us creates the world alone. I did not dig that hole alone. My neighbor was there in the shovel he lent. Who knows what history that handle has seen. I certainly did not make the tree, or the little girl to play beneath its boughs. But, I am part of the process by which all these things have come to be what they are. My part is small, but the acts I take vibrate along distant lines to end at some unseen point. These lines, hidden as they may often be, tie us together, make us matter to one another. They entangle us all like a web, hold us in our places like roots.
