Short story for GEOG

     As long as I can remember, there's always been mourning doves outside my window. I could wake up any day of the year and hear their wailing song, nestled in the giant red pines on the side of my family's backyard. Some days, I'd rise to a veritable cacophony of calls, and while trying to fall back asleep, the droning of the mourning doves drilled into my head. Theirs is the only birdsong that I can reliably identify, probably due to those early morning wakeups. Their presence in my life was as reliable as the sunrise, probably because the sunrise is what brought on their singing. For most of my youth, I grew up alongside the mourning doves, and I can only imagine they grew up with me.

    Just as the birds found home in the threes, so did me and my friends. When playing neighborhood games, the largest red pine tree was always our "home base", no matter what game we played. We always met at the pine tree before riding our bikes around town. Afterwards, we would sit in its shade and peel off its bark, thick with sap, or relax in its lower boughs to pass time. At night, the trees became dark giants, towering over the house, casting shadows, and rapping on my window, as if to taunt me in my sleeplessness.

    As time went by, though, it seemed as if life began to leave our backyard. I remember vividly, at 17, laying in the grass and trying to listen to birdsong, and only finding the noise of the street in their place. The mourning dove's calls became more and more infrequent. With their absence, cardinals, blue jays, and robins seemed to follow suit. My mother, deathly afraid of the snake that once huddled beneath our shed, soon found herself venturing out into the deep grass, knowing there was nothing left to find in the yard.

    I remember my brother's reaction upon hearing the red pines would be cut down. "But that's home base!" He exclaimed. Despite his and my protestations, I returned home in the winter of that year to a shadeless and silent yard. The only remnants of the trees were three large stumps in a row, the neatly lined burial mounds of each giant. The decision to kill the trees was made by my father, after a solar panel audit deemed that the trees would need to be removed to ensure the panels were effective. I can't be upset with my dad for wanting solar panels, I wanted them too, but to have to sacrifice the red pine in order to be more "green" was an ironic pill to swallow.

    One frigid morning that January, I went out to the largest of all the stumps, "home base." As I came upon its resting place, I imagined myself peering down at what remained, counting each of its rings, learning everything there was to know about this corpse. It was a shock, then, upon staring into the eye of the stump, that I was made dizzy by the sheer number of rings, a hypnotic pattern that rippled outward and inward. It shot waves through my mind, gripping me and pulling me to the ground, until I was kneeling with my knees straddling the roots of the roiling tree. Even now, in death, the pine still towered over me. I shivered in my folly, shut my eyes, and wailed for it.

    As I laid in bed that night, I found myself staring out the window where the tree used to be. Its ghost seemed to hang there, in the void, no longer taunting me with it's presence, but now with its absence. I thought of all the nights and mornings where I wished for silence, where I wished for peace from the doves and branches, but peace never came to me.