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 what its tag called a "Greenspire" Little Leaf Linden. For a while I watered it but soon saw I didn't need to. It was doing fine.

Looking at it earlier tonight, I imagined 20 or 30 years from now coming back to check on the tree. And finding it like the other trees along what was once our street as at home here as I once was. Giving shade to those who pass by it. The days of its first New York City spring still held within its roots.

 

Later I came upstairs and above the stove I saw a spider, small, a pale yellow, descending by way of its filament 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 to the stove, seeming to glow against the metal'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.