The Trees That Bind

So already, I think lots of us have trees that we love, that we look forward to seeing, even go out of our ways to see. Every time I drive up to the Eustis Estate Museum, which is on my way to and from my parents' senior living community, I always spend some time looking at the tree that's right next to the house.

 












As this smaller picture of my mother standing next to it in 2017 attests, it's a tree to be taken seriously. Its trunk resembles the leg and foot of a mega-elephant. If anything happened to it, I doubt I'd be the only one who missed it. 

I think that in the time of coronavirus, it's especially reassuring to see such trees, to be reminded of what endures, even to see it enduring. But trees are living things, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as well as the natural journey through life to death. And so we sometimes experience losing them, depending on when we encounter them.

A few weeks back, a good friend who's a current Jamaica Plain resident and my frequent socially distanced walking partner suggested that we walk through the Moss Hill Road neighborhood where I grew up. So we did. I pointed out to her the home of one of my childhood friends who'd had the best toys of anyone I knew because her father worked for Mattel. Aleta had every Barbie outfit and accessory, and her mother let us eat the kinds of candy my mother refused to buy because, she said, it would rot our teeth.

"Spring Tree #1" by Scott Ketcham*

Even better than Aleta's toys was the immense, towering tree in her backyard--her house was one of at least four that backed up to it. We'd play under its ground-scraping branches for hours. I loved that tree so much that I went looking for it one afternoon about twenty years ago while I was working at English High School: above Aleta's old house, I spied a dead treetop that I thought might have belonged to that tree. A few weeks ago, there was not even a dead tree top, so I had to believe that that tree was now truly gone. As I had twenty years ago, I wondered if my childhood perspective had made it seem larger and more spectacular than it really had been.

Too Young to Play "Under the Tree" Without Supervision

That's why I was thrilled that when I told my younger sister that I'd been on Moss Hill Road recently, she immediately asked, "Do you remember the tree behind Aleta's house---the one that had the branches that went down to the ground, so that when you were under it, it was like you were in a room?" Suddenly, I got that tree back; by sharing her similar memory of it, Lauren had ensured that at least between us, that tree would always be.

During the American Academy of Poets' late April #ShelterInPoems Virtual Reading, Rita Dove read (at minute 22:02) and commented on (at minute 23:45) Joanna Klink's "On Falling (Blue Spruce)." It's about a tree, a nearly hundred-year-old blue spruce next to Klink's house in Montana, that fell one night in a storm. It was a big loss for Klink: as she explained in the blurb next to the poem on the poets.org web site, "We bought the house because of the spruce."

Klink's poem quietly simmers with so much feeling that we're forced to recollect our own grief as she grieves. The poem begins with a meditation on the ordinariness of falling in nature: the falling of dusk, of needles, of pine cones that, in her case, "dropped every hour/ on my porch, a constant// irritation." But, to be irritated by things and people, we know, is not not to love them, is not not to count on their presence in our lives. So we understand that the realization of ordinariness will not protect us from feeling loss, especially the loss of what or whom we've chosen.

"Green Sifted" **

While Klink talks about not being able to understand how alteration of such magnitude could have transpired so suddenly--

. .  .. Every day
of my life now I cannot
understand. The force

of dual winds lifting
ninety years of stillness
as if it were nothing, . . ..

I experience her as seeking not to feel the overwhelming grief that she's feeling. But she's no less angry at the situation than she is at herself for being surprised by it: the tree had the audacity to fall "Before it was possible/ to imagine my life/ without it."

Is it too late to come to terms with the loss? In some ways, yes, but really not.

• There's the wisdom accrued: "What is beyond/ task and future sits right// before us, endlessly/ worthy."  
• There's the sense of what can't and shouldn't be replicated: the speaker plants a small linden tree in a different place since "Some change/ is too great."  
• And finally, there's a tree like the blue spruce in a field somewhere "made entirely of/ hovering" that, thanks to this poem's vivid portrayal of it, Rita Dove explains, reassures us that

"our memories, our sense of where we are in a moment, and how we felt in that moment, can never be taken away from us. They exist inside of us, maybe existing entirely as hovering, and yet they are there, in that field, that white and quiet field."

Rita Dove's complete comments about Klink's poem and pandemic times generally are well worth listening to; her poem in the current issue of the New Yorker is well worth reading.

I hope and believe that writing "On Falling (Blue Spruce)" comforted Klink and that reading it, having it to go back to and read again, comforts not only her, but also her neighbors. As she further explains on Academy of American Poets web site,

" . . .  [the blue spruce] rose above all the other trees in this area of town, and had its roots underneath a corner where people paused to talk.  After it fell, in a windstorm so violent that fires broke out across Missoula, I received more than a hundred notes at my door—a few people wanting to work with the wood in a way that was equal to the tree, but most expressing grief. Even now, six months later, strangers will stop me to say, 'It was something.'"

Some things that belong to most or none of us legally, actually belong to many of us in some way. This is true of the doum tree in Tayeb Salih's "The doum tree of Wad Hamid":  "So it is, my son, that there is not a man or woman, young or old, who dreams at night without seeing the doum tree of Wad Hamid at some point in the dream" (8).***

My sister Lauren and I are now planning a trip to our old neighborhood: we need to look one more time for our childhood tree. If we need to explain to the current owners of the nearby houses why we're standing in their yards, we will. Interestingly, Lauren, who has vivid memories of the tree's smooth, grayish bark, believes that it was the same kind of tree as the one outside the Eustis House: a copper beech. Maybe we'll discover that I was wrong, that our childhood tree is still there, standing broad and exult. Or maybe we'll find ourselves in the presence of a tree "made entirely of/ hovering."

* https://www.scottketcham.com/post/119541798937
** https://www.scottketcham.com/image/158869712282 

***  "The doum tree of Wad Hamid" in Ṣāliḥ, A. (1994). The wedding of Zein and other stories (D. Johnson-Davies & I. E. Salahi, Trans.). Three Continents Press.