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Trees as Memoir
Ever find yourself catching your breath, thinking it may be time to reminisce, reflect about where you’ve been in life and what you’ve been doing all those busy days? Maybe you are on a trail when you feel those urges.
Riding a bus through new territory provided an opportunity for me to do exactly that, to dream, to remember earlier parts of my life.
Passing tree after tree, viewing them from the bus’s rolling plush recliner, comfortable as any designer couch potato seat, I journeyed. I wanted little more than to walk in the forests we passed, assured it was unlikely I’d encounter a bear or other unpleasant sort to spoil my walk.
Allowing my thoughts to meander like a stream, I began a list of favorite trees or woodlands I had experienced, ones that had meant something special to me.
“That’s just a story”, my mother said as I put my foot on the first and only tree I ever climbed, a cherry standing alongside my childhood home’s driveway. The memory took me back to times she supported my tomboy behavior. Climbing it, I listened when she told me about the myth of the US’s first president, George Washington hacking down a cherry tree. Maybe my first learning about fake news.
Summers found me harvesting jiggers and blackberries in equal quantities near willow trees, roots watered by the creek running down the thin…
