When you are short...

When you are short, like me, the hardest part of climbing a tree is getting up into those first few branches. I struggle with shifting my weight from the inside of my knee to my shoulder as I slowly turn myself over onto the top of the lowest limb. With my face this close to the bark I notice all the little bits of moss and lichen decorating the sugar maple’s wrists. I am not scared of falling. I am scared of failing. I manage to get my feet up to the rest of me and, with the trunk as support, walk my hands up to the next place I can hold onto. I don’t think I decided to climb to the very top, but find myself there anyway. I remember being there at the bottom, closest to the ground, then here, again but different, at the tippity top. I rock in the breeze with leaves and twigs around me. It’s like I am one of them. I am taller than our house and, below me, my mother, scurries into the road on the far side of the driveway in order to get a photo. She has to be that far away to see me way up here. And I see her, tiny by the mailbox, and my stomach turns. For the first time, I look down and get weak in the knees. I’ve never been afraid of heights, but this far up I can feel how little space the branch takes up between my toes and free fall. I notice how thin the trunk has become, and a worry crosses my mind: what if I’m actually not strong enough? What if I’ve worn myself out on the way up and can no longer get down? What if I’m stuck? What if I cannot make it down by myself and, when I attempt it, I fall the rest of the way, back to my mom? Peter Wohlleben wrote in a book, that, “​​if a tree falls in the forest there are other trees listening”. If I fall in the forest will the trees hear me too? I do not fall. I do not fail. But I no longer don’t think that I won’t.