“It’s just a tree,” I tell myself.
But each day as I stare at it, poke at the dirt, stubbornly water the skeletal form, I know it’s more than a tree. It’s a connective thread – history holding the past to the present, and the present to the possibility of a future.
It is hope. And I don’t want it to be dead.
Reaching and climbing
What child doesn’t love to climb a tree? To feel the exertion of stretching, of reaching higher, of perching on a limb, and gleefully surveying whatever is around?
For years I watched my little boys climb an old Japanese maple. They loved that tree, with its branches low enough to the ground for a manageable climb, and cradling them as they went higher and higher with each season, and their own longer limbs.
Shortly before we left our family home, the tree had seedlings. And so we dug up three, tenderly, when they were barely three inches high. We planted them in tiny pots, and transported them to our new house.
Surviving change
New environments are never easy. Adults bring perspective and other coping skills to unwanted change, and as parents, we focus on the transitions our children must make. Perhaps that saves us from the worst of our own pain, which isn’t deeper, so much as it is more specific.
After all, adults can articulate feelings. Kids can’t. Instead they rely on whatever healing we can provide – our arms and our singing, our routines and our presence, familiarity as we paint it, the new histories we will construct, together.
Two of the seedlings didn’t make it. But one did, toughing out the change and growing steadily these past six years. I have watched it, nurtured it, transplanted it, moved it around, watered it. Loved it, like a child.
When trouble comes
I first noticed three weeks ago. It seemed burned by the heat, literally overnight. And I’ve wept like a damn fool over such an insignificant thing compared to everything else there is to manage. Over a small dead tree, as I refuse to accept that it’s over.
I brought it inside for 10 days. I added new soil. I placed it back in the sunlight when the temperatures cooled. Now I water it, move it around, and wait, trying to will it back to life, to convince myself that it’s only resting, that somewhere inside, work is work being done to enable it to survive.
“It’s just a tree,” I tell myself again. “Give it up.”
But I can’t. Perhaps that’s the child in me. Or the mother.
Fighting acceptance
Life goes on with its usual rhythms; there are my sons and their adventures, my organization project and its slow progress, my writing, like a daily vitamin.
And I return to the tree each morning and each night. In it, I see the other tree, the mother, my sons in her arms as little boys. I know they will reach and climb, now long past trees. But I am smaller. I face narrowing options. I fight acceptance.
New growth
I look at the tree and know that my parenting job is changing, dramatically.
I look at the tree and know that I need to move past it, that I must find acceptance of what is beyond my control – inevitable evolution of roles, of bodies, of circumstances.
“It’s just a tree,” I tell myself. But I keep watering, I keep checking, I keep waiting.
This morning, at the base of the thin trunk, I saw a cluster of small red-brown leaves. I am at a loss, and cautiously optimistic. I don’t know why, or how, and I don’t need to know. Maybe there’s something to be said for willfulness. For refusing to accept that growth isn’t still possible.
Tears in my eyes, BLW. Beautiful post. It reminds me of a scene in 101 Dalmatians when Roger refuses to accept that one pup didn’t make it. Stubbornly, he rubbed that pup until it sputtered back to life.
Beautiful.
I am climbing into the beauty of this piece. The mother tree. The boys who climb higher. The growth after getting burned.
Wow.
I have a love affair with trees. Different trees mean different things to me. There is a barrel willow in our yard that is taking over. It is crowding out and moving in more profoundly than I can say. And I don’t know what to make of it! A tree we hung our Christmas lights in with the help of our neighbor’s tractor last November and made a block party out of the ordeal.
Aspen trees whisper to us and apple trees have been bountiful. I’m trying to learn from trees and your post here is exceedingly helpful. So poetic, so nurturing. I’m grateful to you for writing.
And grateful to the tree for those new leaves.
This is lovely, sweet BLW! Very poignant.
Oh, Wolf. This is one of my all-time favorites.
Beautiful on so many levels. Maybe it’s time for a little fertilizer…and some for the tree as well. 😉
I have great hope for the tree — and so much understanding for that desire not to give up on it because of its past associations. It symbolizes a great deal because it is rooted, so to speak, in memory and emotional investments that can’t just be tapped and taken out like so much sap.
I cut back the heath in our long-neglected garden this spring, down to what I thought was dead wood. It wasn’t. The shrubs, raggedy and brown at their bases, were babies compared to a Japanese maple, but they regrew all kinds of little shoots from that dried up wood, not unlike your tree. I think yours will make it; I’m willing it along with you.
My parenting role is changing in leaps in bounds with my college-bound daughter. I don’t see it as a death of any sort, though. Just an evolution to something different. She’s an adult now. I’m still her dad, but I don’t have to parent. Unless she asks for advice. Even then, we’ll need to interact as two adults, connected as family, giving love and support. But entirely different from the dad/daughter relationship we had while she was growing up.
Love that you didn’t give up. Even when your head told you to, your heart held on. Beautiful.
After Andy’s parents both died and the house sadly turned over to people who would make it enormous I took cuttings from the grand tree that I had grown to love and under which we were married. Taking no chances I had twelve or thirteen little pots and a few sprouted… but alas it was fall and they were so fragile that even an LA winter killed them all (and I felt heartbroken and forlorn).
I send your maple hope and heartfelt good wishes.
I had to read this more than once. The first as a mother and all that the words hold for a mother. The second as a forester and what is the tree’s real problem.
Your writing is beautiful.
So so lovely. You captured an essence that I fear already, and my boys are so young. Change is so hard. And yet so healthy.
Very lovely BLW. I like that you want to will the tree back to life. There so much wisdom in this piece. Thank You.
This is a beautiful analogy. Your words resonate with me today. Thank you!
This post hit home – accepting the death of that tree would be challenging – and yet, the idea that there is new growth… just as there is new growth in each of us as we enter new phases… Sometimes it is difficult to accept the new as it is difficult to accept the end.
Funny how I’ve wept over a tree, and refused to accept that it could be dead. In fact, it wasn’t, though it could’ve been had I not kept watering it. I see myself in that little tree. Still hanging in. No doubt why it’s so important to me, because I see my sons growing tall, and doing well, and moving into their adult lives more and more.
You raise another wonderful point, TE. Accepting the new. The new isn’t always easy. So many unknowns.