Three times over the past few weeks I look out a window or door and see a squirrel bounding across the driveway with an apple in its mouth. Bright gold in the sunshine, a fleshy ball of carbohydrates and seeds, a dozen more trees in ovo, and its transport vehicle: a gray-furred bundle of muscle and bone. The route goes from the immense apple tree on one side of the driveway to the woods on the other. A few years ago I found a tooth-marked apple in a crotch of my tree, and another year looked from my perch through the gray woods of late fall and saw a single perfect red apple in the crotch of another tree, about forty feet off the ground. Squirrel pantries.
Hundreds of apples hang from the source tree, fall by the dozens, lie gleaming in the grass among fallen leaves, and then vanish. Their primary means of escape is by deer-belly, three or four of whom (deer, not bellies) watch me, alert and unafraid, as I leave the house in the morning or return at twilight. There has been a bear in the area for weeks, maybe taking part in the feast as well, though I haven’t seen it. Squirrels carry off what’s left.
I think about these things at this time every year. Countless thousands of leaves, having collected energy from the sun all summer and converted it to carbohydrates, now build up in drifts on the ground, their work done, cellular structures breaking down, returning minerals to the soil, yielding energy to insects and worms. The great energy exchange web flung wide over meadow and woods, substances changing form, growth converting to death and then to new life. It happens year round, but it’s palpable in fall, when so many lifeforms in the plant kingdom expire or shed seasonally, and what they become or lose is taken up by animal lifeforms, energy and nutrients extracted, and then shed in turn for the next cycle of plants to grow from.
Emme and I climb the tree to hang the prayer flags she brought from Bhutan. As we untie and unfurl the tightly wrapped roll, a small cloud of dust puffs out, hangs suspended for a moment in the sunlight, then drifts down towards the forest floor. Bhutanese dust settling into the Vermont soil. Its own energy exchange, of sorts? I think of airplane fuel, looms, money, the economies—large and small—that generated it, and currency exchange; of the farmers that grew the cotton, the animals that fertilized the fields, and the electricity powering the Thimpu shop; of the bag of souvenirs slung over the shoulder and of the breakfast-fuel of tree climbers; and of the sunlight that fed a field of cotton in Bhutan and now shines slantwise through colored panes of it in a tree in Vermont.
Which I guess kind of makes Emme a squirrel, and the prayer flags an apple of sorts. And the exchange a complicated mix of energy, money, culture, and spirit, rather than carbohydrates.
When the prayer flags are hung—spiritual seeds planted in the new earth of this small piece of sky—we climb down and return to the house.
