Tree and Spider

A few days after she left I ordered a tree planted in the barren space in front of my stoop. The city soon put there a "Greenspire" Little Leaf Linden, its tag said. For a while I watered it, but I soon saw that I didn't need to. It was doing fine.

Looking at it earlier tonight, I imagined 20 or 30 years from now, on my last legs, coming back to see the tree. And finding it like the other trees along 123rd as at home here as I once was. Giving shade to those who pass by it, mostly without noticing it. The days of its first New York City spring still held within its roots.

 

Later I came upstairs and leaning over the stove smoking, a position now familiar to me because consoling for the last four months, I saw a spider, small, a pale yellow, descending by way of its filament, dropping in front of me. And I thought to kill it. But I wondered, What if it’s God? So I blew on it, and it fell onto the stove, seeming to glow against the stove’s blackness, and I watched while it made its way along the stove’s seam to its edge, where it descended again by its filament to the floor and disappeared.