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Patterns in the Snow
Snowflakes hitting branches in the forest do indeed make a sound. I listened to the gentle impact as they fell into the beech maple forest of Peninsula Park in Door County, Wisconsin. The crisp winter air felt exhilarating as my boyfriend Jeep and I forged our own path around the trees, up and over the hills. With child-like enthusiasm, I tried to identify the animal tracks criss-crossing the snow. As a wildlife ecologist, Jeep helped me recognize the prints of turkey, squirrel, deer, coyote, mouse, rabbit and raccoon and explained how the patterns told a story about the animal. The prints nearest to the tree and scampering across the meadow are from a squirrel that ran down the tree and jumped onto the ground. The hoof prints by the circle of flattened snow are from a deer that had slept in that "deer bed" for the night. The tiny paw prints between the two fallen, hollow branches are a mouse running from shelter to shelter. Eager to see something rare, I scanned the forest looking for a sight of a wolf, its prints or even the fallen antlers of a buck who rub them against trees, causing them to fall off every winter. We found neither. Instead we walked on, listening to the softly falling snow.
 We left the dense forest for the trail and saw two sets of tracks that I tried to identify. I laughed when I realized they were not animal, but the first human prints we had seen in the last half hour. One set of footprints was much larger than the other. We speculated they belonged to a dad and his child. I followed the prints imaging their conversation and watched as the smaller prints turned toward the larger prints, then disappeared - as if the child had hopped upon her parent's back. Then with tremendous force I thought that my dad, dead barely a month, would never walk beside me again or offer his guidance during my most difficult times. I stared at the prints, submersed once again in my grief and let the tears fall. He had gone in for knee surgery and in two weeks, he was gone. Why did he die? Was there anything we missed? In the end, ravaged with pain, he wasn't as able to provide and protect like he had in the past. I wondered if his inability to carry us is what killed him - broke his heart so he couldn't go on. Or maybe there were blessings that couldn't have occurred otherwise, like my mother and I growing closer. Then I thought perhaps I simply create these grand conclusions to match the cause with its effects and make sense of life's mysteries.
Randomness is unacceptable to our human brain. We look for meaning behind life's events and our deductions become the basis for a new direction. My faith and security has always rested on the notion that everything happens for a reason. But sometimes patterns are too big for us to see, they extend beyond our lifetime or perhaps our ability to comprehend. The beech and maple forest I was trekking is bordered by the Niagara Escarpment, limestone cliffs extending hundreds of miles that formed after millions of years of deposition and erosion. The forest itself was created through a long progression of different plant species over centuries. One snippet of either geological formation would not tell the whole story. Perhaps the same was true with my father's death.
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