The Trees of Life  

 

Into the soil

I remember helping my dad plant two Japanese Maple trees when I was about twelve years old. They were meager little things, flimsy and awkward, not even much taller than me. My memory is one of pre-pubescent annoyance at the whole ordeal. I think partly they made the front yard a bit more complicated to mow, and by that time mowing was fully my job. Or maybe there was a Lakers game on TV at the time (but obviously not against the Celtics or else my dad might have postponed the tree planting himself - we’d root against each other’s teams in those epic battles of Magic vs. Bird). Or perhaps I was brooding in defiance because we’d just moved away from a childhood utopia called “Wolcott Woods” and into a regular house in a regular neighborhood on a regular street surrounded by regular people. Planting a couple flimsy trees in the cramped front yard seemed awfully meaningless to me when there were thousands of giant trees we’d left behind.

I drove by that old house not long ago and one of those Maple trees was an impressive sight to see. I look back now and feel ashamed that I was annoyed at the planting. That tree is lucky my dad was in charge back then and not me. He understood something that I didn’t. Not then, at least.

 

Wolcott Woods

I grew up in what can only be described as the closest thing to paradise a boy might find. You can’t find my paradise there anymore, at least not in a form close enough to match my memory. You see, progress and population has taken its toll on the Wolcott Woods just north of Columbia , Missouri . But back in the day…oh that I could give you a glimpse!

There was a mulberry tree in the back. It was a stone’s throw from the workshop that smelled of dusty paint cans and a moldy sawhorse. The mulberries grew fat every year, clustered up around a second, smaller shed that for all I can remember was never used except as a home for my brother Rob’s pet rabbit Blackjack. There were rusty nails and sticker bushes all around, some ancient barbed wire even, but such things never stopped us from staining our hands and feet purple and filling old plastic peanut butter pales with mulberries.

Not far there was a line of sour apple trees, too. They were right by, if I recall correctly, the house where the homely dog Henry used to live. He was known to venture up our gravel driveway to link up with our beagle Pfandy and later with my sister Katherine’s Pomeranian named Buttons. One time my dad ran out into the woods to physically pull apart one such canine tryst. He was too late, of course. Those litters made some cute puppies, but I won’t vouch for what those mongrels grew up to look like. Of course, we were taught to taunt Henry out of our yard with a rush of yells and clapping whenever we’d have a dog go in heat. But we’d still go to Henry’s yard for sour apples.

If we weren’t eating something from a tree, we’d likely be climbing it. One tree in the front circle we named “ Sunset Towers ” after the resort in the children’s book “The Westing Game” (one of a hundred books our parents read to us over the years). Sunset Towers had a great, sturdy starter branch down near the bottom followed by perfectly spaced arms spiraling up into nooks, enough nooks for a bunch of kids to go take claim in the sky. My sister Elizabeth liked to read there, up in that tree. I remember taking up halved limes and jar lids full of salt, to this day one of my favorite summertime treats.

Past Sunset Towers , over the long rock wall and across a rolling field, were the hedge apples trees. Rightly called Osage Orange trees, these round mothers gave birth to litters of hedge apples by the hundreds. We never really knew what hedge apples were good for, and more than once we’d twist an ankle running over one on the way to see the pony Patsy. Patsy was usually ruminating in the great field of Wolcott Woods. She’d happily eat sweet apple wedges from our hands, and I reckon she sometimes wished she was tied under the sour apple trees over by Henry rather than be stuck next to all those bitter hedge apples.

Just north of our house in Wolcott Woods, though, was the heart of paradise. That’s where the woods were. A sea of trees and a sky of trees, with nothing but adventure in between.

Back one way was an old tattered ruin of another shed (or maybe it was an old one room house) where we’d bake mud pies or, on a good day, use old flour my mom gave us to mix up batches of wheat paste to lay out in the sun. Just past this old roofless shell was where Rob built a fort. His fort got wrecked one day by some older kids who invaded our woods from the north. Thirty years later, he still gets mad when he talks about that.

Back the other way, down a winding and very long path, over roots and through stickers, past a drying pond and along an eroded creek bed, was our lake. Yes, we even had a lake. Probably one of my fondest memories growing up was when my parents would let my oldest brother Keats take me out frog giggin’. We’d get loaded up with our pump-action BB guns, which I would hold always at the ready, but I don’t recall ever shooting a frog. Rather, we’d let the summer night come in and we’d find the bull frogs with flash lights and spear them with a small trident. Again, I don’t ever recall getting one myself, but I saw Keats do it and surely remember holding the flashlight once before he added the frog to the common bucket. It sounds cruel today, especially in light of how the earth’s frogs have all but been killed off completely by our modern and errant chemicals. But back then, these was a growing boy’s dream and rite of passage - staying up after dark in the woods, marching alongside a brother twice your age, carrying a weapon, and bringing home food. (Yes, we ate the frog legs. My mom would fry them like chicken. It never made a meal but it did provide the closure.)

It was also back by that lake that one year Katherine and I found a litter of puppies in the trunk of a very big tree. We were just out and about the lake doing whatever it was we did there, like skipping stones and finding the perfect walking sticks, when we heard scuffling and whimpering up on a small bluff. There, we found puppies – little brown, wet, abandoned puppies – hiding in the shelter of that tree trunk. Can you imagine such a treasure? We talk about it still today. We remember exactly the “puppy smell” of their foreheads and the feel of their round bellies in our small hands. The Nelms family was full up on animals, so we had to see them away to the Humane Society and hope for their adoption.

The stories could go on for a long time. They do, sometimes, when we all get together. The trees of Wolcott Woods connected and observed many stories of the five Nelms children. They bore witness to our Greening, if you will, as we did to theirs. Year after year.

 

Into the soil, again

I suppose Wolcott Woods was my childhood imprinting. Even though we moved away into the regular house in the regular neighborhood the summer after my 4 th grade year, I never let go the feeling of walking into the woods that seemed to have no end. You feel like you’re walking into eternity when you find woods like that. In this regard, this makes the trees something like angels.

I have found the edge of the woods again in Sauk County , Wisconsin . Here, endless woods clothe the glacier bluffs and flow like a royal robe in the wake of the Wisconsin River . Towering Oaks climb into a dome over my house and Poplars and Maples reach in on the back deck.

Yet for the longest time there was this matter of the front yard…where something was noticeably not right. Not quite vast but not quite humble, I saw this grassy expanse not as the great green carpet that many like to primp, groom, and coddle, but rather like a canvas sadly void of paints. Or maybe like a piece of heaven empty of angels.

So this spring, roundabout the time Mamasita and her newborn kittens came into my life, I returned to the soil again as I had with my dad and the Japanese Maples some twenty-five years ago. Yet this time I was cured of my silly annoyances and lack of understanding. It all seemed very innate now. I dipped a wooden paintbrush into God’s palette and dotted my front yard with colors like Autumn Applause, Purple Robe, Blue, and Autumn Blaze, heirs from the royal families of Ash, Locust, Spruce, and Maple.

 

And so, the Equinox

The fall equinox was one week ago. At that instant, or so it seemed, one of my young Autumn Applause Ash trees topped off in red. It hit me that The Greening, this little collection of stories, must be drawing near to a colorful and jubilant close. And so it will, when we return one last time to The Greening to discover what became of that stray calico cat and her four kittens.

Until then, I’ll let the trees of life continue to dress up for the occasion.

-bn

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