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Out On A Limb
by Sharmagne Leland-St.John
On this cold, quiet autumn morning at barely five minutes
past eight I find myself in my daughter Daisy's room. The
smallest and therefore warmest room in this old, 4 story,
circa 1920s, chilly house, devoid of central heat. I am
sitting at the white particle board desk scavenged a
decade ago from some roadside trash heap. Proving the old
adage that "one man's trash is another man's
treasure" and a frugal single Mother's delight! I
marvel as I watch a woodpecker corkscrew her way up and
down a branch of the black walnut tree outside my window.
It is amazing to me that she is fearless as she hangs
upside down some 20 feet or more above the ground. She is
beautiful. She is dove gray with delicate black markings.
Her back is speckled like her distant cousin the quail.
Her cheeks have dark stripes and her head looks as if she
is wearing a tiny toupee. I watch her tapping her way up
and down each branch stopping every once in a while to
hop to a limb above or below. Methodically tap, tap,
taping her way along this intricate network of limbs and
foliage, twigs and leaf, branching out in an almost
dizzying myriad of directions. As I sit here at my
keyboard, sipping from a steaming cup of hot sassafras
tea I wonder what instinct in her tells her to do this
and then I see her stop as if she has found some
delicacy. I offer a silent prayer to the Creator that she
has not found a termite, or a bore beetle, or worse!
Behind her I see a squirrel out for his morning run along
the lower limbs of the same tree. Performing a sole
adagio of leaps and bounds from branch to bough. Two
totally different animals, two different species even,
living in perfect harmony on the same tree. Other smaller
less colorful birds twitter and flit from branch to
branch. The sunlight filters down creating "hot
spots" of light on the twigs, branches and trunk on
the East side of the tree and dappled shadows on the
Southern and Western sides of the same branches and
trunk. The squirrel has stopped. He is arching his tail
friskily up and over his tan and charcoal back as he
studiously investigates a small black walnut which he
rolls round and round in his tiny four fingered hands.
Nature holds such perfection. I see patches of a cerulean
blue sky through the green and yellow leaves of this
magnificent sprawling tree which is perfectly centered
and exquisitely framed by French windows with brass hasps
and hinges. Decals of Winnie the Pooh dressed in a
nightcap and flannel gown snuggling with his little
paranoid pal Piglet, while he dreams of pots full of
sweet honey, are faded and curling on two of the six
window panes. Carefully stuck there long ago by the
delicate hands of a child who still believed that bears
could talk and a certain blue donkey named Eyore was not
bipolar.
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