Carol Gano - Boom

Racing across the expansive skies, was it sound or light that reached us first?

The 'jagged white' hit our old red river gum right at the hollow where the elders had taken a coolamon from the younger tree's yielding bark.

We used that tray on our wedding for berries and so, too, have all our offspring on their weddings, one by one. 

So frequently has it been oiled and cleaned and cherished that our care has imparted a soft, shiny tinge to its redness.

Now the old tree is shaking.

Many seasons have we witnessed her withstand relentless summer sun.

She survives flooding during the wet, while water travels through our country, carving changes to our creeks. The wet

tells us it's time to take another yandi, the tree can manage another set of small cuts.

It survives flooding during the Wet while many families have climbed, hidden from danger or eaten her leaf clusters: possums, koalas, lizards, birds and thousands of insects: pale green leaf jumpers, biting red ants and those tiny little black ants.

Even our local male bush turkey has benefited using her leaf litter to create his solitary nest for local females and their eggs.

It's not just swaying.

The yandi scar target created a bull's eye in the ancient trees bark armor. Now the sound is deafening as lightning lashes into the red river gum. Forces upturn the shallow roots system that held the aging tree to the soil and upright for her entire lifetime.

Her last sound

   - B O O M -

opposes the gentle harmony winds had created in the autumn dried leaves year after year. It had been the unchanged cycle we have come to expect as we age alongside her.

Boom.

She falls.

She has been silenced.