Old Tree

Life, death, and a girl's love from the perspective of an elderly tree.

I wrote this for my mentor and teacher, who is the woman in the white car.  She was going through a rough time as her older uncle was dying.  I remember her saying, "I should be saying things like 'he had a long, happy 80 years' and feeling better but that just isn't working."  Her relatives' ages made her feel old and she was uncomfortable with the idea.

 

As a spur-of-the-moment thing, I wrote this story from the point of view of a tree in my front yard.  The actual events are true.  The trees thoughts, to my knowledge, are not.  But who am I to say?

 

Picture credit to Lena Granefelt.

 

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            I am a tree.  I am an old tree.  Not in comparison to my far-away friends the redwoods, but I am old.  I have decades of heartwood under my bark.

            There is a voice and the sound of a small galloping creature.

            “Awwr, Mugz, I suppose you want out, huh?” the voice inquires as a teen steps out the door, closes it, and then decides it was best open.  Soon after, I feel a tug at one of my center branches.  She is climbing with a book.  That is not surprising for this female.

            She is weighty, but I could never mind.  What is a little pressure to a lonely old tree offered some young company?  This girl is reaching the end of her girlhood, is a young woman.  I can tell because there are parts of her I still recognize as she snuggles in between two of my centermost branches, but other parts that are foreign.  She sets her book upon an old stump of a branch I once had and it stays, so she goes on to hug me and hum.

            I know this is one of the children I watched grow.  She is the eldest daughter, the only daughter, of the family.  Growing up, she and her brother used to play all over me.  It was heaven.  My very leaves shiver with glee at the memories.  They would both clamber up with agile limbs and monkey about.  Sometimes, the boy would get stuck.  He would always jump right into situations without thinking about his ability to plan an escape.

            “Don’t climb up where you can’t climb down!” was the mother’s constant advice.  Often, he got stuck anyway.

            She always climbed where she thought she could stay, planned her next footing carefully, and observed her best course of action.  She did not climb where she could not climb down.  Her brother was cute in his bravery, but her planning was adorable.  Together, the two were a reasonably unstoppable force.  As unstoppable as two young children can be.

            I know she visited me more often.  I have often felt her outside, singing with the birds when supposedly no one was listening, or inventing her own adventures.  Her brother often disappeared into the house with their father, and while she would sometimes join them, she often stayed outside with my stationary friends and me.  She enjoyed the birds and the bugs and the four-legged creatures that scurried about as well.

            A while ago, she stopped visiting me.  It was for a good amount of time.  I’m never sure of this time, for my time is much longer.  We trees don’t see the world with such speed, and so we notice small things.  Like the way she is breathing against my bark now, so I know how fast a resting adolescent female of her size breathes.

            The next time she visited me she was different.  She was always different from the friends she brought to climb my branches, but this time she was changed all the more.  It took her much longer to reach the top of my small height—we always shared that in common, a fact we both enjoyed.  She was stiffer, more careful.  Her planning was all the more meticulous and lacked the playful essence it had once contained.  She was nursing something.

            Her small dog runs barking past and streaks across the yard toward the other side of the house.  She twists her back to watch him.  As a tree, I cannot wince at the action, but I would were I able.  We trees cannot bend so, not even in the fiercest storm.  We would snap.  Most of us, at least.  But she still does it with the youthful energy I remember her having all her life.  Still, I expect some sort of a crack—human creatures do that when they turn their backs all about.  It is much like when we bend in the wind, but less of a groaning sound and more a fierce “snap,” sometimes in quick succession.

            However, when she cracks, I can feel that it is not her back as I expected.  Somewhere below there—the top of her leg—snaps instead.  I feel her frown against my bark and gather from her images that it is her hip, the roots of her problem for the last few years.  That is when she stopped visiting me—three years ago.  I grabbed the time from her mind.

            She kisses my branch when she turns back to me and rests into a more ordinary position.  I know she is still glancing around, for I feel her looking down at me from where she is near my top.  She notes which branches are missing as she has memories of the form I once kept.  She knows there used to be a fork branch off near the driveway since it used to be her seat.  She knows I used to have more center branches that she used to break me up into sections for in her mind, so she could successfully map how she was going to climb me.

            Now she hugs me tight, rests her cheek against my cool bark.  I have some spots that she is taking in.  Now she has taken classes to identify all of my spots and wounds, where the cambium is healing me, and then how the flowers are being pollinated and what they will turn into…  I feel her heart beat through what could be considered my skin.  It is so fast in my time!  How short her life is, but how much she will accomplish—it is astounding to a tree like me.

            We sit here, we please.  I am ornamental; I am here to catch the eye of the passerby.  I am short, and weep slightly with the weight of my flowered and leaved branches.  I sit; I am ecstatic to feel the bees and other insects pollinating me, the birds dancing around my branches, and the wind tangling in my leaves.  My roots stretch out horizontally to absorb moisture and nutrients, to feed me for later and to ground me.  It is said that trees are very centered and grounded.  After all, only our branches move in the wind.  We stay stationary, if we are lucky and are not felled.

            Soon I will be in decline.  “Soon,” in your terms, I am not sure of.  I am old.  I am only getting older.  As time moves on, my branches feel heavier and each spot takes up more room on my branches.  The insects begin to devour me during some seasons.  Still I am happy.  I am here and I have company.  How could I be anything but happy?  I have seen this young woman grow from a careful but fun-loving child learning to climb and ride a bike to a young woman almost prepared to leave the nest.

            The wind travels through my branches and strikes her hair.  She smiles contentedly, sighs out her worries.  My branches creak and move.  She does not mind that she is being squeezed between the two branches she is resting in.  She views it as a hug, as comfort.  If I could smile, I would.  I am glad to offer her those.

            Like trees, she often notices the small things.  She laughs at the way my leaves dance in the breeze, wagging like an excited puppy-dog tail.  She smiles at the creaking of the oak across the driveway, for it has always been a very vocal tree.  (It has always been one of her favorites to hug.)  Another of her tree-friends, she remembers, is across the front yard.  He is a tall evergreen, and used to be dual-trunked.  He had always flabbergasted her.  In a storm, one day, one of his trunks fell.  She came home from school to see a clean-cut stump in its place, and immediately sent her love to this tree who was now missing half of himself.  He has healed very well, but I imagine he still misses that lost section.  How could he not?  But he is strong and centered, and though he mourned, he moves on in our slow time and continues to see the joy in our world.

            She smiles at an inchworm making its way over one of my horizontal branches.  She is amazed by how the creature moves, looping and straightening to inch from place to place.  It must be hard work.  We trees always think movement is hard work.  At the moment, this girl agrees.  A large part of her feels sad, fearful.

            I am sent a picture of a woman in a white car waving and driving away, smiling.  My eyes—I know they are this female’s—look to a pond and then turn.  My walking—look at me, a tree, moving!—brings me into a building, a room with many odd seating places with flat tops in front of them, and then to a frontal flat-topped area raised from the floor.  She—I—turn, slump, cry.  Cry bitterly, cry with sorrow, cry with wet, stinging tears.  Then I laugh.  My tears are damp and playful, happy, excited.  I won’t be using these flat-topped chair-things for a week, am about to go have fun.

            She sends me a picture of another, brighter room, with the white-car woman sitting down in a seat.  I stand behind her with my hand on her shoulder, supporting her silently.  Another gentle soul.  With these two females, even as one is a combination of memories and thoughts and feelings, I am happy.  They are loving, beautiful souls.

            Her last picture is of the woman standing in the room with sad blue eyes, eyes in a downcast face with heavy lips almost curved down.  I am afraid to reach out to her because my young friend is—afraid to offer my hand, afraid to step near this woman—but I know I love her because this young female does (and I do on my own, now).  I know that she is sending all that she has, and so I join her.  Love, courage, strength, compassion, a hug…and all things great and unnamed.

            This girl ends the picture and sends the feelings to me, that she loves this older woman—a mentor?—fiercely and wishes her a cleansing rain, metaphorically.

            We trees have mentors often.  Our mentor is older, stronger.  She is tall and hardened to the elements—to us, anyway, as saplings.  We observe her and grow to embody that strength, that centered foundation, that ability to handle the wind and rain and all else we come across.  Some day, a long way in the future—even longer for you folk—our mentor declines while we are still growing, or have at least acquired maturity.  Eventually our mentor dies, decays, rots—those terms can be grotesque to your kind, I understand, but here in our environment they are respected and sought.  For when my mentor left, he (for he was a he and not a she, to me) shrank.  In that, he gave his sunlight to the others—he passed something more on to me.  He became a home to small animals and insects and birds and even mushrooms.  He became an entire ecosystem.

            I miss him, sometimes.  He was an old tree.  If I am an old tree, he was an ancient tree.  It has been decades since his leaves have bragged of their chlorophyll, have vied for the title of most verdant.  He is a memory of mine and I love him.  Thinking of him, I am happy and sad.

            He was the greenest of the green.  His bark was strong and homey.  Sometimes he threw samara fruit at me, the silly old tree.  He was fun like that.  Even as he was old—ancient—he always had time to sing with the wind.  His leaves rattled like there was no tomorrow.

            Eventually, there were no more tomorrows for him.  But I still remember him.  He is still loved.  There are more tomorrows for me.

            Out there, halfway across the yard, I see a sapling competing for sun.  She is remarkably hardy for her species.  Her face is toward me.  I think she will make it.  Who knows, maybe now it is my turn to be ancient.

            The young woman is beneath me, in my shade watching a large butterfly and a small bird flitter through my branches.

            Someday I will cease to be green.  But until then, I’m going to sing with the wind, for my leaves dance.