Pay Attention

Nature has been insisting on our attention this week. She hasn't been nasty here as she showed herself in Texas, Oklahoma and the Plains. But on Wednesday high wispy clouds moved in; they were lower on Thursday and by Friday the warm front had settled on us for four days of rain that sometimes eased into mist and sometimes poured. On Friday, too, the locusts began to sound. Their voices are neither buzzing nor chirping but a cumulative whirr or susurration that my wife has compared to the noise of flying saucers looking for a place to land in old science-fiction movies. This morning as we left to go to town a tree blocked both lanes of the only road out of our lakeside subdivision, not pushed over by wind but simply having let go of the saturated ground. We pulled into a driveway and waited, knowing our resourceful neighbors would find a way. First a woman on the other side of the roadblock approached the treetop and wrestled with it without effect. Then she was joined by a man who had pulled up behind her--they were foiled at getting into the neighborhood while we couldn't get out--but their joint efforts failed to move the tree. Finally a truck with a trailer and a dog in the truckbed pulled up and a man jumped out. I had seen this truck turning around from the fallen tree, driving back into the neighborhood as we first drove up. I thought the driver might have gone home for a chainsaw. But now he pulled from the truckbed a thick, wide towing strap while his Labrador watched with interest. He attached the strap to the tree trunk near the road's median and hitched the other end to his front bumper. As he backed slowly away--a practiced maneuver, I could see, since the trailer went straight back--the tree cracked and snapped. He got out and pulled the freed treetop away, clearing one lane, and we thanked him as we drove away, slowed by no more than ten minutes.