A Community of Trees

We hold the maple seed in our hand, and we imagine a tree.

 
The magnificent forests of my early childhood first sprouted in the pages of books. There were plenty of trees in the suburban Oklahoma neighborhood where I grew up, but never a spanning, interwoven community of wooded giants that I could walk beneath and among, as I longed to do.

For years after we could read on our own, our dad continued to read aloud to my brother, Nathan, and me before bed. The books I remember most clearly: The Dark is Rising series; The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm; The Hobbit; and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which we read through at least twice.

The last time my father read Tolkien’s words and worlds to us aloud was the year we moved with him to Lost Farm on Nantucket. It was an Audubon sanctuary, fitted with a small house, where Dad would spend the bulk of his career. I was 11, Nathan nine, and in the waning evenings of autumn, the three of us would sit together in the light cast out from the bronze floor lamp. The words and the voice that spoke them were comfortingly familiar in a way that our new home was not. Our living room was small and fitted with bunk beds, doubling as Nathan’s and my bedroom. Dad sat in the reclining chair; Nathan and I sat on the floor or the bottom bunk.

I spent a lot of time reading silently and alone, too, but when I attempted to read Tolkien’s books, my young mind stumbled over many of the words, which pulled me out of the fantasy and into the mental acrobatics of deciphering symbols on the page. Sometimes this was an enjoyable challenge. But I preferred, any day, hearing the story through the vessel of my father. Delivered orally, it was as though Tolkien’s world arrived directly into my imagination, and I could float along the story like a leaf in a river. My mind was free to inhabit and explore, and I lingered in my favorite scenes as Dad read on. I ducked again through Bilbo’s round door. Kept bobbing with the dwarves in their barrels. Climbed once more into Treebeard’s branching crown. Grew drowsy with Frodo and Sam in the foothills of Mordor. Apart from the barren land of Sauron, the entire series took place, in my mind, in an unending forest—not so different from Tolkien’s intention, perhaps, but lacking any sophisticated topography of valleys and mountains. I was content imagining a world of ubiquitous, uniform trees.

In addition to reading us books, Dad required that we spend the daylight hours primarily outside. If there was not a hurricane or a blizzard, we biked to our destinations. We learned to identify edible mushrooms and trim the trails around the house. We carried jugs of water to his research plots, mowed meadows, and, often, simply played.

Being outdoors in the daylight and reading in the evening didn’t feel entirely like separate experiences. I brought the stories with me out into the world, not by playacting specific characters or scenes but by a continued experience of the land as the place where stories could happen. We played a lot of games in the pitch pine forest that grew around our house: capture the flag, fort-building, hide-and-seek. But mostly I remember simply carrying around an undefined but certain sense of possibility when outdoors, like there was a myth or two draped in the trees with the bearded lichen or scurrying away just out of the corner of my eye.

After dinner, I brought the land back inside with me as I listened to my father read. Tolkien’s forests took on more subtlety and clarity as I increasingly came to have my own experiential vocabulary of the woods, even though I lacked the words to express it. The place where the books and the land met was my imagination, not the alphabet.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence, then, that a few months after our arrival to Nantucket, and a few weeks into enjoying evening immersions into Middle-earth, I was claimed for the first time—to use the verbiage of mythologist Martin Shaw—by a mythical forest in my own world. On the trail that narrowed into the woods beyond Lost Farm’s homestead grew a stand of hawthorn trees. That spring, they bloomed. But they didn’t just bloom; they bloomed all at once, like a string quartet inhaling a simultaneous breath and meeting their bows to the strings so that the voices of their instruments sound, not with four voices, but with one voice. A breath and then a harmonic manifestation: pink-white petals, a cathedral ceiling masterpiece between me and the sky. In my memory, I see myself standing beneath this canopy, not as if I’m at the portal to another world but already transported.

Standing amid the petals flipping and drifting to the understory, I felt myself to be, quite literally, under a story. I didn’t have the knowledge or the words to tell it, scientifically or otherwise. I knew nothing of the ecology of hawthorn trees or their relationship to the seasons or the reason for their thorns. Nor did I have any vocabulary of the sacred. No wordy narrative spelled itself out in my mind. I don’t recall that any descriptive words at all rose to the surface, nor do I recall missing them. There was a simple and silent conversation, or composition, at work between the trees and me.

Not long after that spring, a winter storm whipped through the stand. Heavy snow and high wind bowed the trunks. Thorny branches either snapped off or snagged into each other and held fast. Afterward, the trees were irreparably snared and tangled, an illegible cursive scrawl. Though most of the trees survived, the canopy never recovered to what it had been. But I can still return to the moment of that spring. When it surfaces in my mind, my physical body still responds, here in the present, to an infusion of awe. And only with the space of the intervening 25 years can I now say that what was there in that moment was an invitation. And that without being fully aware of it as a child, I accepted. I said yes to being imprinted by this community of trees.

Pulling up the maple seedlings felt less like a removal and more like making room, leaving openings for others.

More than 20 spring seasons after I stood beneath that bloom of hawthorn flowers, I shared the emergence of another spring with my daughter. Aspen and I were in the backyard looking at last year’s maple seeds, revealed in mid-March by melted snow. They were brown and brittle, scattered about in the grass and moss. I held one over my head and dropped it to show her how it helicoptered, but she was more interested in holding it still so she could take a close look. In the palm of my hand, we noticed a little green shoot growing out of one end. We peeled off the outer coating, and she held the seed in her hand. It was pea-sized, flat and round, the color of coffee with a dash of cream.

I explained to her what this seed was. “This will grow into a maple tree,” I said. She fixed me with a questioning look, as if waiting for me to laugh and say, “No, no, not really!” For it is almost unbelievable, isn’t it, that we can hold what will be a tree in our hand? I could see this information play across her face: disbelief to belief to looking at this seed and then imagining a tree. I could almost see it rooting in her mind. In that moment, I wasn’t sure what was more miraculous: that this tiny seed did in fact hold the potential of becoming an enormous tree, or that this tiny seed grew, right then, into a tree within my child’s imagination.

We decided to plant it. I retrieved an empty yogurt container from inside and scooped up some soil. Aspen put the seed in. She gave it too much water, so that mud swirled at the top. She admired her work and wanted to plant more. Many of the other casings were empty of their seeds, which had been eaten by squirrels and birds over the course of the fall and winter, but we easily found two more with green shoots.

“This seed’s perfect,” Aspen said of the third one, in her own palm, before pushing it into the soil alongside the others. I never would have used that word about that little burst of life, with so many others like it everywhere around us that would soon be growing in every raised bed, in the flower garden, in the gutters, in the cracks in the driveway. But seeing this seed in my daughter’s hand, I had to agree.

Several weeks later I was weeding the garden, surrounded by maple seed after maple seed, each with two crumpled green leaves that had shaken off their brittle coats, spreading in the sun like butterfly wings. Their green-white roots already reached an inch or two into the soil. I pulled most of them up, but with several of their sisters growing on our windowsill, I admit to feeling conflicted at choosing our garden over their forest.

But then again… spring was here, and there were northern cardinals and house finches in the trees, and the irises were rising, and I felt so at home kneeling at the edge of the garden beds in spring’s abundance, which was everywhere like a promise. I, too, looked around and imagined the shape of what was to come. Lobelia and lilac, weeping cherry blossoms, and daisies. Pulling up the maple seedlings felt less like a removal and more like making room, leaving openings for others.

Mothering requires that we nurture not only children but resiliency in the communities around us.

After weeding, my hands were covered in dirt. I spread them before me—and then… they were not my hands, but my mother’s. Just as a tree had sprouted in Aspen’s mind, my hands had manifested a presence: my mom. I turned them over. Yes: the same thick fingers and wide, flat fingernails. But it was the dirt that gave them away as inheritance. My mother’s hands are those of a woman who labored for years in gardens—not our own but other people’s. She landscaped for nearly two decades, and I remember how she always came home caked in dirt, dog-tired, and sunburned in the unforgiving Oklahoma sun. This was so she could feed and clothe and shelter us.

There were lean times at the beginning of this career, when she was newly divorced and in her late 20s, with little professional experience. We subsisted on what were then still called food stamps. Our oft-broken-down car meant walks to the pay phone because, also, the phone bills were overdue, and they had cut off our landline service. There were times when, if my brother and I wanted a treat—usually a McDonald’s Happy Meal—we collected cans from the neighbors’ bins to raise the four dollars. And another time, in the middle of the school day, when the counselor excused me from my third-grade class and brought me to Salvation Army to pick out winter clothes, along with several other students. I didn’t understand, and didn’t ask, how we’d all earned this special outing, thinking that what connected us must have been good behavior or good grades. It didn’t cross my mind that what the school recognized in all of us was poverty. That winter, our Hanukkah/Christmas presents arrived in two large paper bags—“from an angel,” my mom said. I can still hear her stifled sob of gratitude and the crinkle of the bags as she set them down on the floor. A woman at the bank where my mom had asked for an extension on making her car payment, also a mother, had purchased these gifts so my mom would have something to give to us. Learning later who that flesh-and-blood woman was did not dispel my belief that she was, indeed, an angel.

But times often didn’t feel lean with my mom. Even when we once ate Hungry Jack pancakes three meals a day because pancake mix was all she could afford. Even though I have since learned the extent of her shame and guilt and the daily presence of a gripping fear that she wouldn’t be able to support us, that the courts would take us away.

She had ways of creating abundance.

This was, in part, a function of her love and her innate tendency toward joy and creativity. She is someone who has managed to hold onto a childlike imagination, far more than most adults. I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense; rather, that she has easier access to wonder and laughter. There is always a new world at her fingertips. She was, and is, an artist. She makes wire sculptures, and she begins, always, with a roll of black wire that you could find in any hardware store. Pliers in one hand, she begins to bend and twist and loop and wrap. What emerges are large, archetypal creatures, built of spirals and stars and motion. Women dancing. Giraffes with bowed heads. Wriggling lizards. She mostly does not work from photographs or real-time observation. The beings emerge from the imaginative world she inhabits, through the shaping movements of her hands.

As a mother, she conjured whimsical worlds and made space for our imaginations to fill them. Once before bedtime, after Nathan lost a tooth, she covered the green carpet between our bunk beds and the room’s only door in a generous dusting of baby powder to prove to us that the tooth fairy existed, because, she said, any other creature would leave footprints overnight, but the tooth fairy could fly. In the morning, there were human footprints through the powder because—I now understand—she did not leave herself any other way to cross the room to leave a quarter beneath Nathan’s pillow.

Our felt abundance was also a function of the community she built around us. She’s the sort of person who could show up in a brand-new city and, several hours later, be greeted warmly by name on the street. She tended to friendships the same way she mulched and watered and pruned and fertilized.

She took pride in her landscaping, slowly earning her recommendations and new clients. Early on, she made the decision to work primarily with native, perennial plants, which required less water, drew pollinators, and could weather the extremes of the Southern climate. The plants she placed into the soil thrived.

So did the community that sprouted up around us. It was rooted, reliable, adaptable. People showed up when we needed them. Not always perfectly, but consistently. When cancerous cells of the same disease that killed my grandmother showed up in my mother’s thyroid, and the radiation treatment caused her to miss a full season of work. When she hosted our annual neighborhood latke parties. When Nate and I needed backpacks and books. Even when, during the 2008 financial crisis, many of her clients could no longer pay her, and she missed several mortgage payments, and the bank gave her the option of either selling our childhood home or being foreclosed on. People showed up. And my mother, like her warm season grasses and her roses and her black-eyed Susans, was resilient—partly because she did not have a choice to be anything else. Mothering, I’m learning, is like that.

Just like the hawthorn trees and Tolkien’s forests overlapped for me in some internal way, the plants and the community of my childhood with my mom also remain connected in my mind. I see their faces; I see her gardens. Perhaps I subconsciously understood that both were the result of care and cultivation.

And isn’t it odd that I did not know I had my mother’s hands until I was sitting there with earth curved beneath my fingernails and nestled in the cracks of my skin? Until my own daughter was digging in the raised beds with a small blue shovel?

I am wondering how to best put these hands to use. How to tend. Not only to my daughter, and to the perennial garden beds my mom helped us put in last year around our home, but how to cultivate sustaining relationships with people and birds and trees and tides. How to bring a fertile, open imagination into these networks of community. How to make them resilient.

I am privileged to be raising my daughter with the means to ensure that she is fed and clothed and sheltered. This does not release me from responsibility to others in our community; nor does it shield Aspen or me from the bigger changes that are arriving as the climate crisis finds its way into all of our places of home and refuge. Mothering requires that we nurture not only children but resiliency in the communities around us. And resiliency cannot be achieved alone. It is both a communal undertaking and an imaginative one.

Motherhood is changing my understanding of what this resiliency looks like. Before Aspen, I was more focused on personal choices, individual action, writing as a persuasive—and often lonely—vehicle for telling stories. But I am beginning to see that resiliency entails place-based practices of community.

I am working to define more thoughtfully the bounds of the communities I inhabit, their function and their meaning. So that in times of abundance, and in lean times, and in times of pain and loss, and in all of the uncertain times to come, we can be there for each other, especially in the places where we are rooted in the same home ground. So that, as that ground shifts and changes, we can imagine and enact ways forward. We can help each other to keep reaching for the sunlight. We hold the maple seed in our hand, and we imagine a tree.