When you drive along a country road and you see two trees with trunks larger than two people can reach around standing above second-growth forest, you know they mark the home site of a family that once farmed the surrounding fields. And if you force your way through the briars and past the two trees, you discover the broken footprint of a home with a stub of brick or stone chimney still standing. The trees are testimony to the strength required to hold a family together and to the echoes that act sends into the future. But for me to plant man and wife trees in front of his house was a different story. The metaphor proved too potent for me.
Music consists of sounds spaced apart in time.
Striking a picket with a stick generates sound. Walking along and dragging a stick across pickets generates time. If the pickets are spaced and sized right, the beat of a tune can be produced. I had thought that the tune would require the pickets to appear to be randomly spaced, incongruous with the geometry of the house, requiring a second look by passersby. I discovered, of course, that music has geometry.