Trees

Trees. At the house of my childhood, there was the liquidambar tree we called a maple because of the shape of its leaves, it's seed pods we called monkey balls. That was in the front yard. In the back, the sweet and fabled peach tree, the avocado tree, the magnolia and the fig. There are stories for each of these trees. The fig used to bleed white milky sap when we trimmed it, the leaves were sticky and the figs delicious for one day only, it seemed, and then turned decidedly ugly. My grandmother rendered these into a delicious jam, however. The magnolia sported beautiful leathery flowers and spread shiny waxy flowers which I spent years, more years than I have actually lived, raking. Before the bus came one day, we tied my brother, Vince, to the maple and then boarded the bus and left him there to be discovered later by my mother. It was the peach tree we hoisted Teresa to the top of in a bushel basket with a rope, I have written about the sudden and unfortunate end of that experiment.

Trees. I got off the freeway to get gas in an unsavory part of the city once. As I filled my car I looked up and down the street and wondered how this neighborhood was so decidedly different than my own. Then it finally dawned on me. There were no trees. The horizon was nothing but graffitied stucco and telephone lines. Not a single natural landmark anywhere to be seen. Suddenly, I felt trapped.

Trees. I have often wondered if, by looking for the tallest thickest trees in a town, you could find the oldest buildings (or the sites of the oldest buildings). We seem to sidle up to the trees to build or camp. In the desert, the places where the earth had ruptured from earthquakes or surprise springs, that is where trees would grow, where the water table was close to the surface. And that is where the pioneers stopped, first to drink, then to hunt, then to settle. That is where they built the school house and the dry goods store and the post office. Perhaps there are people who are paleobotanists or paleoarborists who know the answer.

Trees. I've culled trees in the forest, tagged for cutting because of beetle damage these were forest fire fuel for sure. I burned these in a wood stove on a cold winter's night, the glowing red coals radiating a warmth craved by me from thousands of years of genetic survival instinct. I sit at a desk made of wood. The skeleton of my home is made of wood. I have carved, sawed, sanded and finished all kinds of it. I love the smell and feel of it. We bury our dead beneath trees. In this way, we sustain each other through the millennia.We never think of this symbiosis consciously, but I think it lies just beneath the surface. Trees.

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