It’s good to add a little margin to life

A body these days can hardly see the trees for the forest.

On the home front, no matter how much forest is harvested off this patch of Maine coast, the more the woodlands encroach. Tall spruce trees block sunlight from every direction and a thicket of young fir and cedars obscures whatever lies beyond.

How could anyone see beyond their own nose – let alone spot a maple sapling or mountain ash or slender white birch – since the tenacious evergreens continue to grow and thrive, despite no soil, no water much of the time and certainly no nurturing?

Seems funny to me that an acre or two can be selectively cut and chipped and within a season or two, there’s a denser brush line than before, inching toward the house and spreading a shade canopy that grows moss, not dahlias.

Which brought me to an October morning when I’d had enough. Enough woods-sprawl, so to speak, that I became momentarily crazed. After all, it was Thoreau who said, “I love a broad margin to my life.”

Wielding long-handled pruning shears as brutally and indiscriminately as I would a chain saw, I lopped branches, felled jack-firs and annihilated every alder within the sound of the fluttering of doves.

Then I attacked all backyard cedars, their limbs drooping downward like witches’ brooms, their skins like witches’ faces. They suddenly looked spooky out back and I hated them – those aged cedars.

During the summertime, I might have enjoyed all those curtains provided by limbs and trees, they shielded the deck from passing car lights. They buffered noise from neighbors. They protected privacy. They were a backdrop for the summertime play that was staged.

I agreed with Thoreau in the summertime: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.”

But right now, when daylight is fading and I know what’s ahead, I kind of want to see neighbors. I don’t mind seeing a pickup truck pass with dogs in the back or a tractor dragging logs or a fancy camper housing leaf-peepers.

I’m not certain, as Thoreau believed, “I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Maybe now, right now, I think differently than I did a day ago, a month ago, a decade ago.

To reverse the time-worn adage, it’s not a bad thing occasionally to thin the forest in order to see the trees, to see what is beyond us, to see beyond a boundary, marker, fence or flag.

It won’t be long before nighttime – and cold weather – calls us indoors where shutters are folded tight and shades are drawn. And friends and neighbors seem so far away. They cannot be sighted around here, nor can a streetlight.

Then I will quote Thoreau because I’ll be seeing the forest in spite of the trees and the trees amid the forest. And I’ll invite company. “I had three chairs in my house,” said Thoreau, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”