Terpsichorean Oak

I've been working on this in short spurts for a while now, and consider it a fragment (possibly of a novel) at this point. I have a lot of ideas for where I want to take it, but am struggling with the transitions. It's not the way I usually write, and thus feels unnatural. I'd love any feedback on it.

Here goes:

They parked the sedan near a sleeping residence and ascended into the hills beyond. The two came here often in search of something that neither could define, nor entirely comprehend, only certain that it made each feel at one with the earth he knew. They moved along an animal trail by moonlight, without speaking - as if cautious to shelter some sacred state germinating in the air. It was an hour of steep uphill before reaching the crest, and they stood panting at the mouth of the meadow and peered down at the forested expanse below, to the valley beyond freckled by orange lamplight and stained by the blurred whites and reds of crowded motorways. They stepped into the buttress of a sprawling oak, and came to rest on a limb as the fog summited the mountains adjacent. It roiled down in gaseous waves from altitude and tumbled softly as falling plumes, layering in the delicately bowled plane of the city basin. Before long the lamplights were drowned, only vaguely apparent through the mist as waning orbs of distant neon, and each adolescent gave his best to ignore the white noise, manufacturing in his mind a time gone before their conception, or their father’s, or their father’s father’s.

“That oak, she’s a dancing lady,” the slighter observed from his perch, disrupting the silence with a measured quiver. And the greater saw her too, gnarled limbs careening somehow gracefully down the meadow’s slope like the tormented silhouette of a Degas dancer.

They dove from their perches, tumbling through the freshly dewed meadow, enveloped in the rich scent of oak decay and moist soil, joyful, and eager to see her closer. But their sentiments changed abruptly to find her foliage gone, replaced by parasitic constrictors in the charming guise of mistletoe and scallop-leaved sumac. Her branches creaked precariously under their weight, laboring to harbor their bodies, and equally affected, awash in the sensitivity which was cultivated in the cold and fog, a mood between them was conjured that bound their minds as one. The slighter remarked it ironic that she stood skeletal, wrecked by a yuletide novelty. That, in her frail state, she still carried them with her, and the burden they brought made her weaker still. The metaphor needn’t be extended into open air, for both recognized it.

Moved, vulnerable in the atmosphere, the greater spoke for first and last about his mother, and about the helplessness he felt for her. Five years removed from their courtship, she continued to pay the bill for a past lover’s telephone, and painstakingly manicured the showroom of his father’s business, despite his indifference to her sentiments and the divorce it incurred twelve years prior. She delusioned such acts of selflessness would grant her entry at the gates, or at least absolve her for the failures made in each past relation. She voiced good intentions, and they were sincere - she longed for the forgiving embrace, for the expansion of family and friendship, for the great swell of humility and thanks following the release of pride on both sides. She invested herself entirely in it, and yielded no return but isolation and confusion. But he knew the roots were deeper still. He knew, even if she did not, that in reality she concocted excuses, blaming circumstance more than once, constructing grandiose obstacles to disguise her fear of independence, and in her mind, if the burden of their company ultimately killed her, she might die a martyr.