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Remorseless nuthatches and kinglets and titmice and woodpeckers probe every crevice of bark and mulch and fallen leaf, looking for those invertebrates that have been unlucky enough or careless enough to leave themselves in range of beak and tongue.

When I get to the bottom of the woodpile I toss aside the muddy logs that have lain on the ground - to be rinsed off by the next rain.  Under them are multitudes of pill bugs and nightcrawlers and beetles and ruddy centipedes.  And I am like a pagan god of Destruction and Undoing as I tear away the massive rooves of their winter refuges and expose them to cold winter sunlight and feathered predation.  

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The mark of our woodpecker, the sapsucker.

I kissed the stolid maple where it wept, with ruffled bark shiny and wet and sweet.  The sapsucker has pierced it even as the sap rises.

I sipped that watery draught, which is like the promise of spring.  And a mist cooled my skin as a droplet shattered above me.

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I've never been a soldier, nor in a war -- neither was my father, my grandfathers, nor any of their fathers and grandfathers.  According to family tradition my grandmother's great grandmother was seduced by a French officer in 1848, but otherwise you have to go back to the War of 1812 and the Revolution to find any of my ancestors actually taking up a weapon for battle.  What's remarkable is that, except for some Scots-Irish latecomers who didn't get here until 1871, all the others were here for the Civil War, yet managed not to serve.

There is a family tradition that one of my ancestors had volunteered to join the Union Army, but he and his friend had to clear trees before they left.  My several-times great grandfather managed to drop one of the trees on himself -- breaking both his legs, and so he never made it into the army.  His friend, on the other hand, went to the war and he never returned.

I was thinking of that story as I worked to fell the big maple tree by the shed.  In the end, I didn't drop the thing on myself, nor on the shed -- though the treefall may have murdered some of Nico's cedars.  But now the mulberry tree will get sunlight.

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