I often found myself watching the hours, waiting for Miss Sophia to finish her work so she could join me outside. I lived for the time she shared with me, and even though these moments were just a blink in the great expanse of my life, I must say that I would not trade them for anything in the world, anything at all.
I recall a day, a fine spring day filled with the sounds of bird babies, crickets, and newborn puppies. Sophia was reading to me from a book as she always did, reclining in her hammock between the elms.
'In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity;
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime...'
The words touched something within her. She put the book on her belly, pages down, and stared up into the branches high above us. My eyes followed hers, delighting in the sunlight that filtered through the translucent leaves in a kaleidoscope of glistening green.
'Noah,' she said as she closed her book, 'I want to show you something.' She got up and took my trunk. I followed as she took me around to the rear of the house, to the window that opened into the parlor.
'See this?' she said as stood by the tree, which was well taller than I by this point in its life. She stood on her toes and rubbed a hand over the bark high above her. I stepped a little closer. I had looked at this point a thousand times, but I had never really noticed it before. There in the craggy bark I could see Keeper writing. Faint scars from cuts made long, long ago adorned the tree's skin, just like the pictures that sheathed the tattooed man at the circus. I couldn't read Keeper writing, for no one had ever taught me. But from the look in Sophia's eyes, I could tell that these words meant more to her than life itself.
'These are our names, and the date we planted the tree,' she said as she caressed the scars. ''John and Sophia' it says. 'May 4, 1933.' It was just this big around back then,' she added, holding her hands together to show how skinny the tree had been. She looked past the leaves into the crystal blue sky. 'It was our first spring together. The weather was grand, just like today. We dug and laughed and carried on so, just like two little children. We were covered with dirt from head to toe, but we didn't care. We made love when we got done, right over there next to the porch.' She put both arms around the tree and hugged it tightly, her soft face pressing against the cool bark. 'It seems like yesterday, Noah.'
I stood there as she remembered. Of things good and things bad she dreamed, and I was certainly not one to interrupt. The wind picked up, rustling the leaves above us. The wind spoke through the branches in the way that wind does, and somewhere in that chorus, that majestic swishing of a million green leaves, was the voice of her husband. If one could only listen hard enough, intently enough, one could hear it. It was a happy voice, a contented voice, shouting from a place we could not see or feel or know... I wished that Sophia could hear him, to know he was well. But she could not hear it, for her heart was too heavy. That faint voice could not break through the spell of her suffering, so it soon grew weary and faded away. The wind died with it, and Sophia and I were alone once more. She released her embrace and led me back to the hammock.
She didn't read any more that day, and I did not expect her to. She lay on the hammock, swaying gently back and forth, staring up into the still branches, seeing things only she could see. But the wind soon returned, whispering gently in the leaves. Her eyes grew heavy and heavier still. Soon she fell into a deep, deep sleep there under the elms, the wind singing her a lullaby as I watched over her
