TREE MEMORIES

Trees and Me

Trees have always seemed relevant. More than witness and companions in the outdoors, they are personal history. In childhood they offered refuge and escape. From a 25 foot evergreen, I perched on a branch and surveyed my neighborhood, my territory enlarged. Trees were base in tag and forts. As a six year old, I climbed the spindly cherry tree in our Quetta, Pakistan compound, plucked cherries and ate them.

Who among us does not have family stories involving trees? My brother fell from the almond tree into rose bushes. The cedar next to our house was a surreptitious ladder from the attic for my brothers.

Trees are iconic markers in not just personal history, but history and location. There are trees standing that were alive when Columbus arrived in the Americas--here where the tallest and oldest trees in the world live-- in California.

I always keep my eye out for the delight of a Monkey Puzzle Tree after seeing my first one in Berkeley, my next in Ireland. It is odd to see the same kind of tree in vastly different places.

Tress are iconic and lyrical: they fill with birdsong, their limbs dance in the wind, snow outlines branches. Trees become elegiac in cemeteries. They are not self contained ,but their parts fall, float and seep through the air. The lifecycle of trees are an apparent calendar.

Trees have died on me. Dare I admit that once I helped kill a tree. These are adult relationships. Trees I nurtured for many years have died on me in drought or from fungal infections. Surely, I will never forget these gardening failures.

Two of my neighbors have woodstoves in an effort to keep their heating bills down and the fragrant smell of their wood fires in the winter is a charm. It is amazing that in this day and age, my nearby city cousins solely heat their home with wood.

We are amazingly interdependent with trees--these highly varied creatures who give us so much from foods to furniture. Today, I learned they emit a hormone that ripens their fruit and felt an added sense of kinship as I learn to ride my own hormonal roller coaster.

Essay by Rosie Dempsey