Family trees.

About family...and trees. Not genealogy although I hear that is cool too.

On Wednesdays I do one of two things (I’m pro-choice,) I write about writing or I share writing that I have written that is “real writing.” Write on. (x6)

Maple

I grew up in an affluent suburb on the only dirt road in town. Maple St. was only two houses long and slightly uphill. Our neighbors' shuttered windows were blind to the sight of the suburban cars spinning on ice. So my father spent days each winter pushing cars up the slight slope without the good will that the act implied. After unanswered calls to the city, he began buying tons of salt and dumping it on the road himself, hoping to avoid mandatory acts of kindness. In the side yard of our dark green Victorian was a huge maple whose roots stretched below the rocky road. After we had lived there a handful of years the maple lost sync with the rhythm of nature. In early February it would leaf out, green against the grey sleet. And by July it was dropping leaves the bright color of the construction paper that I cut into six pointed stars at our butcher block kitchen table. The maple had one low branch that I climbed with fistfuls of fallen leaves. I tried to put them back on the twigs. The pads of my thumbs always had red indents where I pressed stem to node. Until I got older and left the leaves where they lay.

Photo by Gilly Stewart on Unsplash

Pines

When my father got rich, he built us a house on a lake. Actually, the house wasn’t exactly on the lake, it was across the street but there was a narrow park right in front of us so our view was unimpeded. Almost. Slightly off center were two tall trees with which my father went to war. He began by salting them, having learned salt’s ill effects from the Maple at our last house. These trees were made of stronger stuff though, or perhaps he knew he didn’t have the time to be patient so one night he took some of his tools with which he constructed his sculptures and turned them into weapons of destruction. He sliced through the bark of each tree careful to complete the circle. Then he waited. Slowly the wounds oozed and then scabbed over, eventually growing back their bark, first smooth and then finally with the fingerprints and furls of a mature pine. He died before they did.

Magnolia

My father was always late picking me up from Sunday school. My attendance was the lone nod to our Jew-ish-ness, allowing my parents to relax into their unspoken atheism knowing someone had educated me about my birthright. After 45 minutes of learning the difference between a lulag and a lemon, and marveling over a language with no vowels I waited for my father’s Plymouth Reliant K that sported snow tires year round. In mulched beds beside the circular drive was a mass of Magnolia trees. Bored, I picked off their buds, stroking the fuzzy outer layer against my cheek. Then I pried it open, thumb nail working the line where lips of the husk came together until it opened just a crack  like the steamed clams in the pot on our stove. I peeled the unborn leaves off one by one like an artichoke. Until I found its heart. On the ride home I picked the sticky innards out from my fingernails. Red like blood. Decades later I remember one Hebrew Phrase.

Abba ba

Father is coming.

Bonsai

My father had a bonsai graveyard. A shelf ran around the ceiling of his sculpture studio that was lined with the skeletons of bonsai trees. Some of them he killed himself, but many he got from the bonsai dealer a 45-minute drive from the city. Customers wandered through the display gardens, walking stone bridges that arced over water lily filled ponds. Their arms held potted miniature junipers and their carts carried Japanese maple trees small enough still to be trained for a world in miniature. My father, however, was looking for bonsais from the afterlife. Usually a place of birth, this nursery also housed the dead. “Any casualties?” he asked the owner. Back in his studio with his slightly obscured view of the lake, my father bent close, eyes covered in magnifying goggles and snipped their brittle branches with the same specialty scissors that he used on his living trees, and carefully rearranged the tree limbs into human limbs, arms stretching out, legs striding forward. 

Then, breathing in metal as fine as talc, he cast these human trees into bronze to live forever.

A penance and a resurrection.

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Did you have to (I mean get to) go to Sunday school? Do you have a particular interest in Flora? Or flora- because the capital makes it seem like I am asking about a person. So I will. Do you know anyone named Flora?