We had a giant storm come through a few weeks ago. It did the kind of damage tornadoes do, but it was straight winds stretching across Iowa. Trees got uprooted and torn down, pulling down power lines and houses with them. It was horrible.
My house took a pretty big hit from just the wind. Trees are still small on our lot which was formerly a pasture.
Trees are not small in my old neighborhood, though. The place I grew up. We moved there when I was ten, from a farm we'd rented and I'd loved with my whole heart. On the farm we'd had free reign to roam and get into all kinds of adventures. A windbreak grove of cypress trees grew on the edge of the yard of that house, and we each had a favorite tree we claimed as our own "fort". Mine had ropes tied around it, an old hose that served as a Bat-pole, and a little tin cup that I pretended was a telephone. Moving to town meant I would have to leave that tree. The house my parents had chosen barely had a back yard, and there definitely were no good climbing trees there. Just two saplings on the side yard. Nothing to brag about.
Moving was hard for lots of reasons, but for some reason I fixated on the tree situation. I eventually acclimated to town living, appreciating the nice paved sidewalks and a few neighborhood kids to do things with. We'd ride through the 'hood, discovering new territory every day. We could get down to Czech Village easily, and occasionally we'd make it to the river on family bike rides. Slowly and surely, that new neighborhood became our home--my home. I walked to school every day for four years up the back alley, through the church yard, and up to Wilson.
Trees are part of our perfunctory view. We don't even really notice them until someone decides to chop one down. The trees all around that neighborhood that we moved to almost thirty years ago are in a large part gone now. They blew over and uprooted and lost limbs, leaving open wounds that are un-healable. The pines in the alley where I could look out my bedroom window and almost pretend I was in the mountains, the oak trees with the acorns that I walked over and cracked on the walks to school, the neighbor's lofty tree that was for sure the tallest one in the neighborhood--they're now reduced to logs on the side of the road, waiting for the city to haul away and turn into mulch and firewood.
The tiny trees in my parent's yard grew through the years. One of them ended up being removed and then the remaining one grew and grew. There was a limb that hung low, and I'm kind of convinced it did because of all the times we hung on it, pulling ropes and trying to swing from it. In the fall we would rake piles of leaves up from that tree and jump off of the trailer top into it. That tree that I hated because it represented the loss of my favorite place at the farm, became shade for the house it stood next to and eventually shade for my own children when they visited Grandma. A part of the perfunctory scenery of that post-war neighborhood where families grew and moved on, and new families moved in to live.
The storm pushed that mighty tree over, leaving a ball of roots sticking up into the air, grabbing the lines all around it, and also taking out the corner shrub that had been there when we moved in. I wasn't prepared for the shock and grief that happened the day I finally got to see the neighborhood of my childhood, post-storm, littered with the trees that watched my childhood. There are still some there, but it will never be what it was. But even by the time we moved there, it had already changed from what it was in the beginning. Time goes on, and houses and trees fall to the inevitable atrophy that comes in the space we live in as age and weariness pull apart the treads we've woven together to call a community.
I'll miss that tree, just like I miss the way the neighborhood looked in those first days of wonder as I rolled down the street in my old banana seat bike, noting the houses and their inhabitants who were laboring to make their yards feel like home. I'll miss that tree like I miss the neighbors, the Czech ladies who built their lives in the new world and watched their beloved homes make way for new families like mine, kids who walked on their flowers and rode bikes down the street and stayed out in the street lights, hoping for one more day of summer. I'll miss that tree like I miss being able to climb it or any tree, like I miss the moments of my brothers and sister together with the neighborhood kids. I like to think it had a mind of its own in some ways, and it willed itself to grow into the sheltering tree it was in the end. That it made its branches spread while we played soccer and went to band practice and raked the leaves up every fall. Maybe I'm crazy to think that its beauty mattered even a little in a world full of changes and fast-paced decisions. but maybe that's why we hurt a little when the trees leave us, because nothing about them is fast-paced or changing. They grow consistently slowly, they change in season like they're meant to, and they offer for us a view of God who makes all things beautiful in his time.
