We watch the sun disappear over the ridge west-by-southwest, a final orange flame dying down to a smolder. The valley below greys, falls mute. A spread of clouds runs overhead, its advance steady, swift, seen from our vantage through the tight wicker maze of budding branchends: all the hardwoods, the needled pine. Their limbs arch this way and that, views as irregular intricate panes. High winds push them on, the clouds that is. High, light, crystal cirrus strips riding the dusk to darkness. . . . Spring rose up all around today. Sweet, opiate. Night comes steady.

We’re the last stand it would seem, this here grove. We cling to a forested midstory along an easy grade from where we can survey the present situation. The last season took a deep toll. There were five other stands left come the leaf fall: one on the laurelled precipice, two under the heavy shade on the northeast face to either side of the spring, another down at the head of the valley past the fallen rills of birch—blanched rotting victims of an earlier blight. And then, us. Those in the understory, the stands of our kind that had folded into the hallow and dug in along the spring’s tumbling creeks, they have been dead for seasons now. That’s where it all started, this damned pathogen, an anthracnose killing us off slowly, coldly. Its reason for being lay in our demise, bacterial life wrested from our death. Every Spring we count our losses. A few seasons back it just became easier to count the living. We were one of five stands last leaf fall, but there was already trouble. The two stands along the creek, especially: lower branches dying back, most having developed the leaf spots, the first sign of the eventual. We never brought it up. We make it a point not to burden our kind, to never point out an obvious oblivion. Still, it makes you think long and hard about the eventual we will all some day face.

It would seem we’re the only stand within view unfolding buds this Spring. The lifeless cling as in mortal shock to dead leaves from their final Winter. We turn away and look ahead, our flowering blooms unrolling like fans, crowned like pale umbrellas of hillside smoke. It is once again time for us to take stock, to call roll. It seems cold, fatalistic, a routine for routine’s sake anymore. There’s no warmth of soul when peering into the eyes of extinction, only a stone deep stare. Our kind need only carry on. And right here is as good a place as any. Digging in, we keep morale high. These are the times that call for resolve. Maybe we’ll make it, this here stand. Maybe we’ll endure. . . . Maybe we’re next.

Our kind wants to believe in the optimism of Spring. We want to believe that our tenure within the cycle is one of repetition: enduring, perennial, infinite. When we peer into the sky, we see not only the dome of blue, cloudbanks as banners. We see the potential of each day. We take it no further than that. We don’t want to accept the eventuality that is death. And maybe only to spite its eventuality do we cling to such a naive mortal sense of security, a shapeless control of something that is in the end fleeting and elusive. Maybe that’s our reason: simple defiance. A latent cynicism towards the one sure thing in this life.

What we do know is that on Spring days like the one just now passing, our kind erupts with the vitality of another season. It is a show of strength in the face of a killer, a celebration of the life we continue to hold. We take hold of the moment, reaffirm our vow to this great cycle. In its renewal lay the revelry that we hold sacred: the dirt, the air, the sun, the earth. It’s a blueprint for success. It predates us and will outlive us regardless of our demise, granting little more notice of its own actions than the miracle of seasonal rigor, this renewed lease. That is, until the lease is up. We can’t know. A Spring will come when green stems will stall within bark greyed, lacking of life. This here—this seasonal unfolding, this blooming renewal—is an affirmation, just as well as an acknowledgement, a nod to the fact that every life must relinquish its holdings and rot into the dirt. It is eventual: life leading unto death. Impending and silent within the resolute timbre of the forest, the mountain springs, the Appalachian hill . . . an edict as old as the dirt.

It has been killing us slowly, coldly, for more Springs than we care to recall. Why do we live? This here stand? Do we have what it takes to outlast a killer targeting us, systematically eliminating us? Do we have an immunity unknown to our brethren? Or are we the final chapter, the last stand before this tortuous procession that has crept slowly up from its damp riparian breeding grounds near the springs’ confluence? Our kind has questions. We brood, as if only to prove that we still can. . . . Yet now is not the time to wile away what time we may have left pondering and speculating. Instead, we invest our days in the big show: one more Spring yet. Here we make our stand, the final stand.

Night’s ink cloaks us, shallow roots dug in along this damp easy grade. At this elevation, the air is free. The valley views are tempting, but here is where our roots have sunk. It is all the home we need. Overcrowding is a worry reserved for the lower reaches of these old slopes. We enjoy space and the communion it grants. Here, the remote backwoods allow for easy days and nights, the misted heat of Summer as welcome as the Winter snow that drifts and dusts. It is all that we, this here grove, could have asked for. Sure, we face an impending fate. But we stare it in the eye, with conviction. We don’t fear, but revel in the steadfast resolution of everyday ways: unfolding springtime flowers, leafing out, soaking in the victuals of daylight’s spatter. We can’t avoid a fate that lay unknown before us, resident in the rigored rotting trunks of our fallen kind. They hook broken in death, wrecked, mangled, and distorted in ways not meant for the living. They serve notice, a grim foreshadowing warning us all that this cycle proceeds without emotion. A fear of death and love of life wraps our reality. It reminds us that there is no time to hesitate, that we have no time for worry. This is our place, our space, for better or worse. We can only revel in the coming of another Spring. We cannot know. It could be the last. The plague abounds, soaking, stinking, perpetuating its curse in the sustenance of infectious disease. Creeping slow and deliberate, it kills us, each death killing off a minute sliver of those still living.

And so, we the living, we carry on. We carry the torch of our kind, are all in. Thoughts of helplessness, pity, regret, these fall away in this: our unwavering fight to the death. This is our fight. It is for our very survival, as much a part of this cycle as the sunrise or sunset. We are but simple guardians of this here: the greatest show on earth. Our moment is brief, this mortal coil a limited guarantee. But the importance of the moment—of all the million living cumulative moments in tandem—that is the strength of it. It is a lineage, the fabric of life proceeding on minute levels. Yes, this is our time to shine, here within this maze of wonder and deep within this forest we call home. This blight defines us as much as the flowers come Spring. But it is only a moment within the millions of which we are but a small part: a small vital part of the living. The most we can make of this Spring is the least we can ask of our kind. And so, we bloom like hillside smoke.