Up Close & Personal

September 21st

Thought it’s officially the first day of fall, the leaves on the autumn blaze remain green. There are no black spots on her leaves like the ones that have beleaguered the Norway Maples all along the escarpment. It’s cold–10 degrees–as I sit down to draw under the tall leaves of our neighbour’s bamboo stalks. The invasive plant grows under the fence and pops up all over our lawn. Every year I hack away at it and my neighbour gives me tomatoes by way of apology for his experimental planting gone awry.

I find it hard not to stay longer to draw the beech tree, and the tall meadow rue that blow against the fence.

The maple shoots upward, with a never-ending series of wish-bone departures, bending towards the light.

This is a tree with many young forks, a repeating pattern of “V”’s, of new growth. There are a few branches of substantial width. I wonder when the splitting will stop and the thickening begin? 

It makes me think of the Church.

When will the splitting stop and the thickening begin?

Up Close & Personal

Today I sat close to the maple to draw her bark. During COVID I did this with the birch street on the front lawn (now sadly replaced by the solitary gingko). The exercise was calming at a time when uncertainty abounded. 

Both the birch tree and the maple were hosts to many insects that bored into their bark and tried to make a home in tiny portals. I worried for the Maple when she was newly planted and large, black ants found their way into a vulnerable spot to make a giant nest. I concocted a potion to deter them and physically bandaged the opening. It “worked”, though the wound looks scarred and craggy- the tree looks older than I think it should, though I have no benchmark for bark conditions. I feel invested in the health of the trees because they have grown into a private, green oasis in nineteen years, and someday someone else will need to scan their bark and leaves for disease or infestation. Someone else will need to cherish them as I cherish them.

What if someone bought the house and cut down one of the beeches to make room for a shed? This completely sensible endeavour (this home has no garage) feels offensive to me. Irrationally, I fantasize about how to prevent such a thing. One doesn’t change oneself to an urban backyard beech tree. This isn’t the rainforest. And yet, I don’t like the idea.

October

The backyard gets shadier each week. As I position my chair with my back to the only remaining sliver of sunshine, I contemplate the three fences (all different) around my little forest. “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places”. 

I consider this verse while trying to keep my pen on the page. The ink is grounding me in gratitude to my neighbours, and our shared history.

To the south, old cedars separate us from our new Indian-Filipino neighbours who enjoy raucous cannonball jumps in their pool. I love their laughter. The previous neighbours fought bitterly, and then won the lottery and moved out of the neighbourhood. I haven’t seen them since. To the west, the two river beeches and a red maple make a wall shading us from the escarpment. Before we planted this trio, in the early days of living here, we once spied a teenager on the other side of the fence we hoped could maybe give us a break from our young children. We circled the block and introduced ourselves to her parents (we’re not crazy, we’re just new in town!) and regained date nights. Though the trees prevent us from spying on the neighbours, now we hear our now grown babysitter’s niece shrieking as she barrels down the slide on their side of the fence. It would take effort to spy on us through the leaves, but we would be up for child-minding, should neighbourhood parents need some relief. It only takes the blink of an eye to go from wanting a break, to wanting to hear a child’s voice tell you an un-ending story about Minecraft or Pokemon.

Finally, the boundary lines to the north – a strange combination of privet hedge, sun-deprived raspberry, bamboo and cedar compete for the light. These neighbours were the first to welcome us; they started fresh with a new build beside our older home, and while we planted trees, they poured concrete over every available surface. While this affection for cement has at times created a headache for drainage, we have improvised without complaining because of the small attentions given to our children over the years. What’s another forty feet of weeping tile if the kids get easter baskets? It’s absurd, neighbouring. 

It’s absurd, because roots are absurd. You put them down, and you don’t know exactly how they will grow.

After a month of contemplating  a native tree in my backyard, something shifted in me. The cottage around the corner, with its pine tree perimeter and its beautiful front porch still beckons, but for now it will be someone else’s home. The author of Ecclesiastes writes about the fabled “time for everything under heaven”, about the time to plant and to uproot. It was clear when to cut down the elm and the birch, it has been less clear when to uproot ourselves. 

The wise Ruth Haley Barton, in her book “Pursuing God’s Will Together”, suggests practices for noticing feeling of desolation and consolation. She writes that one must reach a place of indifference when it comes to discerning which way to go. 

As I spent time contemplating the maple tree in my back yard, watching its leaves grow from brilliant green to blazing red, I felt desolation at the thought of leaving it behind. Moving to the house around the corner might have made sense on paper, but it wasn’t making sense in my heart. I loved the pine trees in theory, and while I was confident I’d grow to love them, I loved my maple from experience. I knew it intimately. I had saved it from the ants. (Maybe.)

The kids think their parents are having a crisis of sorts, flip-flopping on their plans and waffling in indecision. Someday they will hopefully also make some dubious financial decision because of a tree, and when they come home to tell us about it, they’ll know just where to find us. 

On Combating the Habitual

This fall we decided that after almost twenty years, we were going to move. Around the corner. Our youngest is making plans to travel abroad after highschool and we are making plans, too. The “new” house, forty years older than our current post-war one and a half story abode, is surrounded by pine trees, a little cottage in the city. Thinking about this adventure has been a placebo for grieving my chicks leaving the nest. 

When the children were young, I had the opportunity to teach part time while practising my creative writing craft on my days “off.” I cherished the ritual of returning to my desk to continue a scene, a sentence, a sentiment. When the pandemic descended, my schedule altered alongside my family’s, and the return to my desk was more often procedural than procreative. I lost the familiar rhythm, and later found a new one working with young people intentional community. I was gathering stories and it was (is) exciting and fulfilling, but the cost has been that returning with attention to a scene, or even an entire manuscript, has proved elusive. My creative muscles grew in other directions, but I missed my writing desk, my old desktop, the solitude of the alcove in my bedroom. I promised myself I would return. I am not sure when.

And then, this past September, I went back to school. I looked forward to reading thousands of pages in dusty libraries (I am always on the hunt for the perfect Hogwart-esque library nook) and turning my hand to essays once again after years in the waters of fiction.

Isn’t this a beautiful place to read? No one even dares to unwrap a mint in here.

Alongside the more academic reading, I was assigned a weekly task of gazing at a native plant, and drawing it. At first, I thought this “world-viewing’ task superfluous to my scholarly ambitions. I’ll get this over with. I wasn’t expecting tears, or revelation, or a coming home to my vocation, but it turns out, beholding a tree can do all three.

I wanted to begin with words, not drawing. How we came to plant this tree, rather than another. I chose to begin opposite to my instinct- to take Corita Kent’s suggestion and begin with shadows. We’d planted the tree for shade, and now, in the cool of early September, I was looking for the sliver of sunshine remaining in the backyard. This placed me near the trunk, so I considered how to draw the bark, the cracks and wounds and roots, but my attention drifted five feet to the west, to the stump of the elm tree we cut down to make room for the magnificent “Autumn Blaze” maple. The elm tree stood alone in the yard for years and bore the weight of the children’s limbs as they grappled with her to escape pirates and marauders below. They survived their childhood without hanging themselves on skipping ropes precariously knotted in her branches. She made room for river beech to the north and south of her, and sheltered the maple until its canopy touched hers, and then we cut her down to let the maple grow tall. The elm stump is now home to invisible living things, its rings puzzle pieces drying in the sun.

The elm was the third tree to be cut down on our little lot. The year we moved in, the city cut down two beautiful but dying Norway Maples that hung over a crumbling wall and dropped branches on the street. Those stumps were ground down by big machines, so that today there’s no memory of their place on the street. The year our firstborn arrived, we planted a birch tree where the Norway maples once grew, and it shot up and branched out, shading the entire front yard. Before our daughter left for university, as though to mark a transition, we cut down the birch tree for fear of its branches falling on the neighbour’s property, and planted a slow-growing gingko that I have yet to love as I loved the unbridled growth of the birch.

In his book, “A Grace Disguised- How the Soul Grows Through Loss”, Gerry Sittser writes about how grief is like a tree stump in his backyard. In his words, he writes “the stump remains, still reminding me of the beloved tree I lost. But the stump is surrounded by a beautiful garden of blooming flowers and growing trees and lush grass. Likewise, the sorrow I feel remains, but I have tried to create a landscape around the loss so that what was once ugly is now an integral part of a larger, lovely whole.”

The elm stump reminds me of the children’s laughter when they chased one another around the backyard, in the before time – before they had phones, homework, jobs, COVID. It reminds me of the backyard ice-rinks we made when it was cold enough, and the string lights along the laundry line. It reminds me of a time when life seemed simple, and the problems of little children were proportional to their stature. 

The autumn blaze maple is objectively more beautiful than the elm tree ever was. And yet there are no children to climb her thickening branches, just a middle-aged couple, who turn to one another in the morning as the sun reflects off the leaves, alighting the entire house in an orange-red hue, who say in wonder, “isn’t that amazing?”

Only ten years after cutting down the elm. What a tree!

I’m not sure what the morning light looks like on evergreens, and if I will love it the same way. Our son is not in favour of the move. He wants to bring his grandchildren to this house, where his memories live. We contemplate the changing leaves in the backyard, and hesitate.

Veracruzana—A Novel of Mexico's Gulf Coast

Hotel Mocambo, Veracruz, MX

1968

In a crumbling, seaside mansion, young Camila Lomelín is sheltered from the sparks and fire of the civil rights movement, seemingly destined to follow the sedate bourgeois trajectory of her parents until tragedy strikes and the cries of Tlaleloco’s victim’s reach the port of Veracruz, threatening to tear her family apart.

In the aftermath, her brother’s revolutionary fiancée continues to resist while Camila’s parents barricade themselves within thick mansion walls. When a desperate boy shows up on the doorstep one day, Camila lets him in, and a bit of life returns to the Boulevard.

The boy becomes Camila’s playmate, until a betrayal sends him away. Lonely once more, she sets out to find work and falls in love with a forbidden suitor. Though disobedience goes against her upbringing, she refuses any path mapped out by others. She longs for familial harmony, for safety in her country, for the freedom to pursue the marriage of her choice, for the privilege of  raising a family without being dragged into the underworld of rogue ranchers…But to have any power at all means bowing to convention, fighting a revolution or succumbing to the pervasive corruption around her, and she rejects it all. Subsequently, neither marriage, motherhood or vocation turn out the way she thought. When heartbreak returns, so too do unlikely allies, who encourage her to tell her story in a sanctuary of her own creation.

“Veracruzana is at once a portrait of the sparks and fire of the 1960’s Mexican civil rights movement to the globalization of the 1990’s and the emancipation story of one single woman caught between the institutions of the past and the possibilities of the future.”