THE ROOF
By A.D. Newcomer

This morning I slept late, until the sun had shone on my face long enough to wake me, until my little orange cat had nipped at my nose, my chin, my eyelids long enough to convince me that it was indeed unreasonable that my cats should get their breakfast at such a late hour. As I began to rouse myself from hazy slumber, I remembered my little niece, a few years back, waiting in the guest room of her family’s house, leaning over me as I slept and gently whispering in the sweet, eager voice of five year old innocence: “please wake up, please wake up, please wake up.” She wished to play with her aunt.

I woke up then. I wake up now.

It is a lovely spring day, today: the kind of day that makes every conversation begin with “what a beautiful day!” Well. Yes, so it is and so I take my coffee, fling open the window and climb out onto my roof. The two cats perk up and swiftly follow.

The cats and I are glad to be out on the roof, feeling the warmth of the sun, but we miss our tree. For you see, and I am just noticing it now, really seeing, that a tree is missing. There used to be this tree, whose trunk rose parallel alongside the house, and in the crook of the roof’s elbow where the roof juts out to cover the bay window of the apartment downstairs, the tree trunk branched out into leafy limbs that shaded the deck chair that dear friend Alice gave to my roof, branched out into leafy limbs that gave one the illusion of being in an elevated forest, provided a nook of nature that partially obscured us, me and the deck chair and the cats, from view. It afforded us a bit of privacy amidst the mowers of lawns, the trucks clearing away the recycling and garbage, the frolicking children next door, the summertime passersby. One could see without being seen.

Our roof is now bare of this shade and we are exposed.

I do not know where the tree went. I only know it is not here now. Where did it go? How did I miss that, I am left to wonder. I am an observer by nature, but a tree has disappeared inexplicably, inexorably from my yard. Have I turned so inward that whole trees can up and walk away without so much as a “by your leave” and I don’t notice?

So I sit, now, on my roof and I look and I listen and I half –suspiciously, half -apologetically eye the other trees in the yard. The sounds and sights of summer, of life lived outdoors, of human life exposed, of nature defiantly still there and dressed in new bloom, miraculously regenerative despite us…these sights and sounds are beginning and I look and listen willfully, because my tree is gone and I don’t know where it went.

My erstwhile tree, my roof, my apartment (my home?)…all these things are on a village street. It is named First St., though it is not the first of its kind; what, these days, really is? Nor is it anymore a quiet street, the street upon which, two floors removed, my roof sits upon. Not in the summer (or even the spring, which it is now; I speak of summer but it is only just beginning, it is really now still spring; I am impatient). Not if you listen, on this street in the village that has more layers to it than a tourist can see. Cars with their tops down for the first day are going by faster than one would think in an ostensibly “sleepy” town like the one my roof sits above, the engine roar of one here and there accompanied by the pulsating bass of a car stereo. The streets here are paved not with gold, but with eggshells; it is a small town and it is growing, changing, and it is sensitive, and the cars keep coming, right over the eggshells. Crack, crickle, crack. The tourists cannot possibly see this, but I hear it.

I hear the girl downstairs (sitting on her steps, I imagine) talking on a cordless phone to the boyfriend who has recently moved out and is now at the other end of cordless technology, connected by an unseen string of waves and signals and signs and such. She is imploring him not to raise his voice at her. Her beagle, Dodger, rattles the chain that tethers him to a tree in the yard. The clink clink, rattle, clink has become an instantly recognizable sound. I do not know if she hears it, if she knows he wants to get just one foot past the length of his confinement. She is busy trying to get one foot past hers.

The grandmother from Brooklyn next door calls loudly to her grandson in that shrill voice that her granddaughter’s is now beginning to resemble. “Daniel!!” “Get down from that tree! Do you want the police to come and take you away!!” He is a little boy, he is only four. Can he know she is not serious, only employing scare tactics? Perhaps; kids are smarter than we are sometimes. He is, I think, up in that tree because in a completely fenced-in yard he simply has nowhere else to go but up, and he has played already with everything at ground level that the fence affords him access to.

Meanwhile, the local teenagers, carefully outfitted to express that there is more than what we let them see and they know it, are walking what is probably the ninth or tenth lap around our small village, chattering in their own vernacular and I marvel that my own teenage idiom is already obsolete, that at 33 I cannot know that the meaning of the phrase “she must take the short bus to school” is synonymous with my own generation’s “well, she’s one bud shy of a bong hit” unless today’s teenager explains it to me. They are chattering now, in their own vernacular (and I am repeating phrases as if I am Jamaica Kincaid writing “Mr. Potter,” oh, dear) and practicing at adult wisdom and wit as if we adults possess such things which I suppose at times we do.

“You’re just like my mother,” the girl downstairs who is not a teenager anymore, who has been thrown into the “real” world, is saying to her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Dodger has resigned himself to his relationship with the tree and the chain it is attached to that attaches him to it. He is waiting patiently for his walk, for however unjustly beyond his control this imprisonment may seem to him, he has faith that he will be taken off for a walk sooner or later. He knows there is no sense whining now, when she is so tied to the other end of cordless technology. Dogs are smarter than we are sometimes.

The new yoga instructor in the village (the village is changing, bringing with it yoga instructors among other things) drives by in his little white convertible, proving beyond doubt that one can be physically elastic and spiritually balanced and still drive a fashionable car.

One lawn stands triumphantly, freshly, mowed, and another lawnmower, previously unheard, is now the dominant sound of machinery. The neighbor on the other side of my roof calls to her dog and across the street I hear the sound of a trashcan lid being set down over its can to conceal the week’s refuse. Amidst this activity, I sit quietly, even soundlessly, and gaze at the dogwood tree, and am glad for its presence and impressed by its ability to flower, in the last week, so unobtrusively as to only be noticed when it is finished, and the weather is warmer and we come out of our houses and are struck by the beauty of the dogwood tree. More cars roll by, quickly, in succession: another round of ferry traffic from up the road.

In the midst of the silent defiance of the trees and the man made sounds (for even the rattling of Dodger’s chain is not of his own design) I can hear the birds from time to time, the chirp of a small little thing in the yard, the whine of a seagull further off and silence - wordless portents - from the blackbird sitting soundlessly on the stark white picket fence next door. In a moment he will be gone and leave me to wonder what to make of his fleeting presence. Seven blackbirds, according to Native American legend, indicate a journey, but I cannot remember what one blackbird means.

Still on the roof, the cats are now seeking respite from the increasingly warm sun; they are huddled under the deck chair because it is all there is to shade them. They are dreaming, no doubt and I do not know what sights and sounds are in their dream world; I do know that they’ll never tell.

The girl downstairs is almost in tears now, pleading, trying to bend present reality to her needs but she has tried now for months and is lost in the rut of the same repetitive argument, taking a strange sort of comfort in it, because at least it means they are still in something together, because she does not want to be alone, is not ready to bet on the future, does not feel safe in this little village that families move into because it seems a nice safe place to raise their children. She is new here but the argument has become old, something familiar. The argument feels safe. At the same time it makes her cry, it makes her feel safe; she is not ready yet for a new reality. But yesterday she mowed the lawn because no one else would have, carefully steering the mower around the tree stump that was once a whole tree, my tree, and today she will walk the dog and perhaps be struck by the beauty of the dogwood tree that still remains, that has not been felled by the landlord, and perhaps soon the argument will end. And something will be lost but perhaps not all will be lost. Perhaps that is a safe bet, that there is always something left.