The Magic Tree

Populus fremontii

I noticed the Frémont cottonwood after a fall rain. Flashing light in the little valley below the house caught my eye as I sat at my dining table and poured my morning tea. The sun, bowing low to the solstice, skirted the ridge and slanted a ray of light into a clearing flanked by the dark shadows of cedars and pines. Its spotlight lit rain-wet leaves on an egg-shaped poplar, and the droplets exploded into a billion white glittering diamonds.

A breeze filled the valley. Cedar and pine waved and sighed, but the poplar rippled as if in ecstasy. It shimmied and shivered, a morning dancer throwing mirrored kisses across the hills.

I stared, transfixed. The tree shimmered on and on, an arboreal pop star, performing on a stage of grass and blackberry brambles before an audience of evergreens, blue jays, squirrels, and me.

Waves of light undulated across the tree as if a body flexed and swayed in a glass-beaded dress. As sensual as any human dancer, hypnotic and flowing, something stirred and swayed underneath the curtained chemise of lighted leaves.

A friend of mine once said, sometimes I feel as if nature wants you to notice it. It calls out—look at me! look at me!—and when we take the time to open the eyes behind our human eyes, the eyes that see wonder and magic, nature enters the realm of myth. Goddesses are born on rain-wet leaves that flutter as if attached by mere threads. Sylph creatures appear when you least expect them, so you’d better always be ready when they dance right in front of you while you pour your morning tea.

Last year an early wet snow dropped branches from the magic poplar, and I thought I’d seen the last of the shimmering dance. But poplars, wetland trees that grow quickly, had by the last days of summer grown back into a vase shape. It was a different shape formed by a different year, but still, it was the same tree.

This year we’ve had no rain, so all the trees have held their brilliant colors late into the fall. The dancing poplar was the last in the valley to color. The poplar entered at last into the theater of darkening days. This year she dances in the raked sunlight, robed in gold but still a rippling beauty calling Look at me!

And I, ever the human voyeur, watch her dance.