I killed him without mercy while he bowed his head at a funeral for fallen friends, the friends I had killed mere moments before.
He had flown in just for the occasion. Perhaps he was delivering the funeral oration like Pericles honouring the dead of the Peloponnesian War, for it is a war. In their world, it is battle and then soon after, they smell the grave. Like his venerable ancestors, he would have lived for 28 days at most. If he had written a memoir, it would have been a quick read.
We will never know the truth from his black and vile mouth parts. He is gone. His spirit has flown to the shadowlands to look for sugar or, more likely, something disgusting. But I feel no remorse Musca domestica. We both know what we signed up for.
Your brothers and sisters will soon come for me to carry on this war without end. They will land on my face and arms while I am trying to read the news or to write this on my computer and they will be unbelievably annoying, exacting revenge in your name while you moulder in your roomy house fly mausoleum that is the kitchen garbage can. I carried you there on the fly swatter like a spartan warrior who died honourably, carried home on his shield.
Enough of that. What I really wanted to talk about are my new spruce trees, especially the white spruce, Picea glauca. They are native in the valley. From our place on the river you can see them on north-facing slopes in the river coulees where they loom over all that they survey, sentinels of their green preserve.
A big one can be 130 feet and they get very old. A white spruce that looks after himself can live to 350 years (about the same as cottonwoods) according to the guy who writes the internet, which must make it close to the longest living individual ‘organism’ anywhere on the Canadian prairies (I’m not counting cloned aspens which seems like cheating). I say this being very aware of the Limber Pine (Pinus flexilis) which is so gnarled and bent and beautiful that God might want one as a walking stick if he had bad knees, which he doesn’t.
The Limber Pine’s northern ranges extends to the Alberta Rockies. Researchers cored into one old timer near the headwaters of the North Saskatchewan. They believe it is at least 3000 years old. Why don’t we know about this and celebrate it? There should be a festival or something but, alas, Pinus f. is a mountain dweller and is ineligible for our imaginary prairie longevity contest. Let us now circle back to the stalwart white spruce.
350 years is still extraordinary. I’ll be happy to make 200. I trust my young grandson, Jack, will look upon my white spruce grove for me as they approach full apogee. As a consolation prize I’d be flattered to be buried beneath one where I could provide some nourishment if not much else.
Anyway, I insisted on white spruce, and I got the last six at the tree farm, all 18 to 20 feet. The owner told me that they were shifting to Colorado blue spruce because they were less susceptible to disease. The sad triumph again of efficiency over the natural order. I’ll take my chances with the whites but had to also take blues too, fourteen of them all around 10 feet and beautiful just the same. As soon as the trees went in the ground, chickadees appeared and flitted from branch to branch like fairies.
Here you see our new trees. The blue spruce in front and the big white behind. Behind them is where the Hobbits live.
We have gone from an almost empty lot fringed with riverbank chokecherry, saskatoon, buffaloberry and willow, to a yard with our own mini forest. It is exciting.
We hope to do a lot more too. I see aspen, river birch, mountain ash, and wolf willow in our future, all natural residents of the river coulees and fast friends with spruce trees. This is a picture from the other night. As you can see, everyone in our community gets along. Saturn and Jupiter are seen here hanging out with one of the local hills and a garbage bin.
Don’t underestimate trees. If you need a life coach, ask a tree for help. Trees are literally ‘life’. Planting a tree is both a bet on a better future and a guarantee that it will be. It is a green gift across the generations to those whom we will never meet and a better gift than any of us deserve, chickadees excluded.
Trees are also a silent and stolid reprimand to the noise and flailing of social media and the finger-wagging scolds, professional victims, hatemongers, political poseurs, and their ugly virtue-signaling woke-ism. That pathetic group divides and sows disrespect. Nothing good can come from it.
But trees and nature slow us down, teach us patience and respect and they are only too happy to humble us, remind us that there is no free lunch and there are natural consequences to bad decisions, which is what we need just about more than anything else, even if it does hurt our precious feelings.