March 23, 2005

•   The tree stands.    I drive down the bumpy dirty driveway sneaking down a road I no longer belong on.  And breathe a soft smile, for my tree still stands.  It is small, and crippled looking.   It stands on a small dirt hill having changed so little.   And yet the memories surrounding it are many.   And I smile softly to myself.   Each time my family or my friends start talking about that time in my life.  We talk about the tree.  The Crooked Tree with a capital C.   Each person who has married or has a prospective spouse has talked about the Crooked Tree.   And hauled that spouse to stand beside or drive beside the tree.   Each spouse or prospective one has laughed when they’ve seen it.  “Doesn’t look like much,” But we smile, smile because it stands.                     
  

        They are right it doesn’t look like much.  A little shaggy cedar tree that was bent crooked sometime in its youth.  We never knew how it got that way.   It was a part of the story we never heard.  I always liked to dream that my father or one of his brothers did it when they were little.  The property had been in my family that long.   We theorized that a deer used it as a scratching post, or the stock that used to run in the field rubbed on it.   Whatever the reasons it was tipped funny and grew parallel to the ground for a long time.   Eventually it found a way to grow back up toward the heavens.   And there it grew, preparing itself to shelter our childhood. 

  
  

   “Mom, its so ugly, couldn’t you have found a better tree?”   My oldest daughter asks me.  And I just smile, for the ugliness was a part of its appeal.   It gave it mystery and fascination.    “Yes, its ugly, but so often in life the ugly things in life are what teach us our greatest lessons.”   I respond waxing entirely too eloquent for her liking.   She rolls her eyes in her wise seven-year-old way and snickers at me with her brother.   

  
  

   I laugh at her.  She’s right I’m being too serious.  The tree wasn’t serious it was a place for playing, for laughing.   A place for dreaming of what we would be when we grew up.  We saw how high we could climb, and what we could dig in the dirt under the tree.   And we laughed.

  
  

   I took a picture of the tree with my mind and turned the car around.   It was time to go shopping, to do the boring errands, and cook the dinner.   It was time to feed the baby, and clean up my son’s messes.   But in my mind I was back to a time when things were simpler and yet much more complicated.

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