Wide, squatty, and hollow, it's almost not a tree at all, but a cave, or an instrument, some kind of woodwind: there is room enough inside for a man and a guitar. ~ My great-uncle's voice seeps out of branches and bark like an oracle. Our fate is a tune that coils its way into the clearing, unsteady notes amplified as if by a megaphone, the nonsense chorus of Waltzing Matilda filtering down from the canopy, my cousins dancing in a circle around its sonorous girth. ~ In August, sing becomes a noun -- not a family picnic, but a family sing. We come armed with songbooks and lemonade. This is the way we have come together, our voices meeting each other in familiar chorus, the tree vibrating like a conductor. ~ The tree has been hollow since my father was a little boy, but even now its naked boughs surprise like sickness in summer, this thick-boned skeleton, odd among the density of island growth. And its strange voice, a dying aria I have heard all of my life. ~ I watch my great-aunt sing "America the Beautiful" at her husband's funeral It's Thanksgiving. The hymn book shakes in her knotted hand, telling its own story, but her firm voice transforms those shining seas into my great-uncle's famous blue eyes. She finds him alive in there, and sings him into a place he has never been but always will be now. This year death has come in threes. This is how it is sometimes, jarring but half-anticipated after the first one, like triplets in their graceful stumble through a measure, the deaths of three great-uncles. ~ The singing tree is actually two trees. I only realized it this year. At root level they began to grow together, their two lives tangling into a massive oaken one. Eventually this intertwining killed them both. At the base, our singing hole is a small cavern created before they converged. How unlikely, the way the world will shape itself. ~ Nearby the beach sings a different song, our feet harmonizing with the low-tide sand, a humming stride over the wave-hardened patterns that stretch like fish scales into marshweed. This off-pitched overtone is a reply to the ocean and all of its voices. When we are gone, there are always gulls shrieking their anxious refrains along the Sound. ~ Today I find the tree posed in the stillness of prayer. I'm alone here for the first time and it feels coffin-like inside. Hunched in the dampness and dirt, I try my first note, the opening line of Camptown Races, doo-dah rising above me and lodging itself in the trunk's inner-skin. Buried inside, I can't hear my voice echoing into the woods, but I know where it has gone: out among beech and maple and oak, broadcasting its notes into the singing world.
Nina Riggs