The maple sapling with burlap-covered root ball sat atop the grass in our front yard while Daddy repeatedly plunged a spade into the soil and heaved the dirt to one side.
“Please, Daddy, I wanna help!” I couldn’t even lift the almost-as-tall-as-me shovel.
Glancing long at my high ponytail, zip-up hoodie and sneakers, Daddy cracked a smile—then more sternly asked, “You’ll do a good job?”
Vigorously I shook my head.
The earth smelled like an early morning walk in the woods when Daddy set the maple into the hole and replaced the soil. I watched him push a broom handle between roots to tighten the dirt. “Kathy, I need you to tamp the soil around the tree, to pack the loose ground until it’s hard and smooth enough to help hold the tree.”
Around and around that little sapling I danced, my feet rhythmically patting the dirt tighter and tighter as I went. There, in my dizzying frenzy I began to love the tree as my own.
Soon the maple sprouted clumps of spring-green flowers, showed me tiny mites parading across her bark and inchworms dangling from her branches on threads of silk. Later, she sent me spiraling helicopter seeds. How I loved opening those helicopter halves and sticking them on my nose to look like Pinocchio. Others might disapprove of my silliness—but my tree—she accepted me for me.
Truly my maple and I grew up together, her smooth taupe covering and my pale fleshy one, weathering seasons, one after another.
As that tree’s limbs grew so did mine, till I could hang like a monkey from her thickening branches. I learned to climb. Higher and higher I’d go until I ran out of footholds, hidden from view high in the tree’s canopy. Like a sailor in a crow’s nest I would watch the world go by. Then I’d settle into the seat of my maple’s branches and lean into her trunk. I’d prop my feet against her wood and read or write for hours. She was mine and I was hers.
When Daddy traveled long weeks for business, when siblings mocked or Mom was preoccupied elsewhere, my tree stood steadfast and unwavering. In awkward in-between years, it was the tree who held me as I scrawled my hurts upon loose-leaf and tried to make sense of others’ angry voices. Worries that I had to hold in elsewhere spilled out so naturally in the arms of my tree.
In her arms I penned my first stories. I knew her shade on hot summer days and her colors each fall. My maple weathered those seasons of life with me like no other. (Once, when asked where in my childhood home had I found safe haven; immediately my mind skipped outside to the tree, “Kathy’s Tree” as the family had come to call her.) Indeed from burlap-covered root ball to nurturing comrade, that maple was mine.
Though miles and years separated us, each time I saw her we were more alike than ever. Her branches thickened, her bark grayed and weathered from life’s storms. But as her lifetime and mine intertwined, I saw a mature beautiful friend standing strong—firmly rooted in the soil but reaching for the light. And I love her still.