Trees
(a work in progress..)
The day you were diagnosed with Leukemia, the weather was full into one of those humid August days in Kentucky. While the doctor spoke to us, I remember watching the trees outside the large windows of the exam room. Our room overlooked a little stone courtyard, empty except for one woman who walked in circles talking on her cell phone for ten minutes and then disappeared. The trees were tall, spindly things with curling bark. A few yellowed leaves had dropped from the branches and scuttled along the grey cement riding the hot breeze. The trees were tall enough and full enough to create a little canopy above the courtyard. The sunlight cut through the leaves making a dappled pattern on the ground. The room in which we sat was icy cold, and I shivered, goosebumps creeping up my arms, each hair standing on alert for some sudden attack. I checked my heart rate on my Apple watch. I saw it climb, sit steady, and then slowly fall. I watched the trees and tried to breathe. Every particle of my body longed to fling myself out the window and into their arms.
It was to the trees I often ran as a child when the world was weighty, my heart claustrophobic in my chest. Our yard, a country yard where the yard only stopped at the edge of as far as my dad was willing to mow, contained so many trees I loved: the large dogwood with the perfect branches for sitting and climbing and the huge stately pine where I got my fingers sticky from the sap and made beds of pine needles or woodland “soup.” There was a dip in our yard surrounded on either side by much smaller trees that created a ceiling above--my own Lover’s Lane, and the exotic Mimosa, whose wild perfume and pink blossoms transported me farway during the summer. There was the dark trunk of the cherry tree and the tart cherries I had to race the birds for and the apple trees that produced the most sour green apples as the seasons hastened toward Fall.
I loved each of them like a little dryad. It was to the trees I would run to play, having no brothers and sisters of my own. I would lose myself in the world of fairies, King Arthur and Anne. On foggy, rainy days, the rolling land became Dartmoor and I, a female Sherlock Holmes. It was to my dogwood tree that I ran to sit, cradled in its branches to write stories of my own.
At Christmastime, my dad created magic in the trees with large, brightly colored bulbs. He would string them through the branches of my dogwood tree until it looked like the glittering top of a carousel. I loved to sit inside our room with the bay window that overlooked the dogwood tree and watch the lights and snow at dusk. When allowed, I would bundle up and sit in the dogwood tree surrounded by the glow of the lights, December air stinging my cheeks. I remember the feel of the warm bulbs in my mittened hands--the primary colors with chipped paint, how their minuscule warmth competed with the whipping breeze.
As I grew, my trees grew with me and I found new friends: the tall trees standing like centuries over the picnic tables at the camp I loved. The tree outside Cherry Hall at Western Kentucky University that turned the most brilliant shade of yellow I had ever seen each Fall, such a brilliant yellow that it made my heart ache in the strangest way, the Bradford Pear trees at the first house we owned together and their white blooms covered in a late spring snow--how I cried the day the electric company cut them down without warning.
There is a tree that stands alone on a hill on our family farm. It overlooks the pond my dad built many years ago, where his cattle now drink. Everyone in my family knows that as my tree. I don’t know why I love it, for I haven’t spent hours sheltered under its branches as I did the trees of my childhood, but something about it’s strength and beauty draws me to it. It leans slightly to one side but stands resolute. I photograph it, trying to catch each angle but none of the pictures I take conveys the smallness I feel as I stand at a distance and admire it. There in that smallness I find a kind of comfort that cools the burning in my heart for a few moments. It is here and yet not here and makes me now think of the tree Niggle worked to paint in Tolkien’s short story that I want to read over and over as I struggle with my own words and thoughts and the difficulty of the craft of capturing them.
I remember the trees that lined the winter walk to our wedding reception--the forest was so quiet that only the sound of a stream could be heard running under our feet. I was not cold on that January day, as your hand warmed mine. I remember the trees in our yard that calmed our babies as they cried from colic and how they would blink their dark eyes open at the trees above, suddenly silenced by the change of the air and feel of the breeze. My heart again pained by a queer ache of knowing and understanding the souce of their comfort.
I love the trees that line the edge of the farm near my parents home, the sudden transition from mown grass to woodland mystery. The trees that shelter two small graves of my best companions. I think about the wind ruffling white fur, the dart of a squirrel up a tree, and the tumult of barking and paws. I think of the day the orange earth swallowed the tiny white body curled so perfectly at peace, and the mad urge I had to run, scream, rescue him from the cold ground--how I just stood against that urge and watched, wept, and crept silently back to the house.
And so, the day the world tilted on its axis in such a sharp way, the day I had to work to coax each breath in and out of my body, the trees helped me again. Stand in the wind, bend with the breeze, they whispered. You will bend, you will not break, though your leaves yellow and fall. There is magic in the death of winter. Look for it. Be on the lookout for it. It will find you in the safety of the branches and in spring time, you will be reborn.
