After Sandy

I never studied the downed limbs before Sandy. I was savoring the muscle burn from herringboning my way up a hill or fretting over a ping in my back, the price of macho competitions in the steel mill of my youth, Where one didn’t just carry his own weight, He showed up the next guy. Is that what the preening hemlock was up to before relentless winds left it writhing at the feet of puny peers? Before Sandy I took no inventory of the fallen. But now, as I recover my breath and shiver, the sweat soaking my collar, I honor the once wiry, powerful maples, decaying in the cantilever of weaker kin. The snowmobile trail, obstructed, forbidden after Sandy is open, welcoming, but now bounded with once majestic limbs, brutally cut and lifeless. Here at Herrington Manor, alone under a charcoal sky, I think back to my day trip to Antietam, where I, never one to study battles and count their casualties, shuddered by the ditch where thousands were piled, the earth still soaked with their blood a week after battle.