North Woods

by Daniel Mason

Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.

Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness.

I have come to the opinion, generally, that he who does good to the land shall be protected, while he who trespasses upon her will be met with most violent return.

And yet, I know my work is done here. I have found my corner of the world, planted home and garden; both are thriving. Having sown my seeds, I must defend them. I do not trust the rabble that thinks the land is theirs, and not vice versa. The Indians too fear the revolt. Like them, I have seen the swarming men, their locust’s harvests. Like them, I join our King.

If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—of frogsong, of thunderheads, of first thaws—that hid within the canonical Four.

In sum: I can live like this, and if I must endure the distance, it is as one can live through winter knowing spring will come.

And yet deep down, he dreams—as all historians dream—of a text so pure that reading it would be a form of time travel.

she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.