Blood Willow
A man threatened to hurt me. He gave my children nightmares of his impending attack. I carried a pistol on one hip and a baby on the other for the first year I lived in my new home, a home so full of light and hope, and, finally, fear.
I won. I took him to court, I got a restraining order, he wailed about the unfairness, but he stopped overt aggression.
Instead, he harmed the path between us. He drove on the grass to kill it. He hacked the trees to ugliness because it was his "right" to "maintain" along the easement.
Once, a willow burst forth into life in the creek. I loved it deeply, a survivor like me.
I also knew the danger and I intended to transplant it that spring to a place safe from the man whose smallness burst forth its own survival pattern into harming the world he couldn't control around him.
I arrived too late.
He cut the tree off halfway up, and my fury boiled over with the blood flowing from within me.
Tears on my cheeks and blood pouring from my hand, I consecrated the tree, praying a prayer of apology, of fury, of a rage long earned over a lifetime of hurt, and I cast him out with my blood and with my words.
He left that summer, his family moved away after 15 years of terrorizing the neighborhood.
The blood stained the tree for the season, and, true to its nature, it grew prolifically in the face of the attack that had tried to take it down.
This spring, I am bringing cuttings of that blood willow to my new home.
Protector and protected, but which is which?
