I can’ t remember life without the tree.
It’ s one of those things that was an ever-present reality in my life growing up, along with Fantasy Island, Aqua Net hair spray, and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. My father moved it as a sapling to a spot right beyond the driveway. And there it grew and grew, straight and tall as an arrow, until it kind of took over the driveway with its leafy branches.
As a teenager, I almost backed into it. As a student, it welcomed me home from college every summer. As an adult, I sat in the backyard with it on cool, crisp fall afternoons and watched as Big Wheels and tricycles and scooters raced by it at lightning speed.
Every year its leafy branches would shield us from the hot summer sun. Every fall its leaves would fall. Every winter its branches stood tall as a sentry. And budding leaves grew again every spring as season after season tiptoed across its branches.
My father loved that tree. He was so proud of it. He watered it through the hot, dry summers and trimmed its leaves and watched it grow. I think it was his favorite place to work out all his problems. At twilight he would water the yard and pick up the branches and talk to the tree, offering long, lengthy conversations told in confidence to an old friend. I was never really sure what he whispered or what was on his heart.
But I know that the tree heard every single word.
And then suddenly, without warning, early in the morning on a summer day, my father, the most wonderful, incredible tree whisperer, passed away. I’ m not sure that the tree ever fully recovered. After my father died, no one really paid much attention to it. No one watered it or trimmed it or whispered to it any more. We couldn’ t.
Our hearts were too sad.
A year later in the middle of a thunderstorm, a lightning bolt struck the tree, and it came crashing down. It was uprooted from the place it had stood for all those years. The tree lay fallen on the ground, and I thought that was the final chapter.
The end of a season.
But the tree’ s story didn’ t end there. Four months later
Solutions 43