Keep the music, let the ash trees go

Days are getting shorter and all of my ash trees are officially dead. I planted more than thirty of them almost 30 years ago, and now they stand as lonely, leafless sentinels along the road to the north of my house. There has been some debate on what to do with the standing carcasses and, because I live out where few venture, I’m planning to let them fall to ruin, to ash as it were, not from burning but from decomposition and my own neglect; living things now dead, still rising toward stormy skies.

Intermittent rain keeps me on a tractor every few days, mowing the fields and trails here. On a recent Sunday, morning I tuned in to a couple of local church services and one of them featured a song from my extreme youth, a song it took me half a day to get out of my head; “Jesus Loves Me.” It’s a tune that doesn’t work with the secular, insistent sound of a tractor’s diesel engine and I struggled to replace it, then found myself singing a favorite from when I was twelve. For two hours I sang the Beatles’ “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl.” Weird, huh? I was singing about losing a girl when, at that age, I didn’t even know what it was like to have a girl, let alone lose one. It’s still not something I fully understand.

My hollow looks as beautiful as ever. I mow quite a lot down there and somehow or other the continuous cutting over the decades has eliminated weeds. No dandelions, no clover. Some years back a young acquaintance took a hike through the hollow and as she ascended a bluff to the house she smiled and said, “How can you not believe in God after experiencing something like that?” Back then I didn’t put much stock in what seemed simplistic thinking. I was wrong. The death of my best friend opened my eyes to much of the beauty I’d not noticed, and I thank her for that.

As I write this, the world’s naughtiest cat (Luna) sits in a front window. I never know what’s swirling around her little brain. The sun will set soon and, if she hangs out there long enough, she’ll see a mama deer with her new baby fawn move through the front yard. Luna, to her credit, attends these events in perfect stillness, never letting those beyond the glass see that she exists. It’s a skill many of us would do well to practice.

I mentioned music earlier. Sometimes it can be overwhelming. On a recent trip to Louisville, Kentucky a friend and I stayed at a nice downtown hotel where we had dinner just off the beautiful hotel lobby, a lobby where a pianist played songs befitting our age. You know, stuff from the 1960s and 1970s. We spoke to an expressionless, long-suffering bartender who said to us, “I’ve had to listen to that music every night I’ve been here for the last eight years. If I ever win the big one I’m going to buy that piano, drag it out to the street, and smash it to bits.” Such simple, exquisite picture painting deserves our appreciation, with maybe a guitar riff playing quietly in the background. We smiled all of the way to our table.

By the time you read this many of you will have set up lawn chairs and bag chairs under a summer sky, anticipating the green, red, and gold embers we call fireworks, extraordinary bursts of flame and thunder invented by the Chinese a couple of hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ. Consider this: pyrotechnic displays of sound, smoke, and light for appreciative folks living their lives in long-ago China, displays now used to celebrate the birth of a new nation, one that is still relatively new, perhaps needing a bit of work, but then, don’t we all.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here