My mother’s
god-daughter emailed me this morning.
She and her mother had just found out that Mom died from the Georgian
Court newsletter. The phone rang
mid-afternoon. I answered to hear a
voice say, “Mary Jo, it’s Mahjree Hahvee.”
Marjorie Harvey roomed with my mother for one year at Georgian Court
College in Lakewood New Jersey. My
farm-girl mother completed four years, but Marjorie only stayed for one before
transferring to Tufts. She’d gone to
private schools, rode horses, grew up in Boston, while my mother worked on her
family’s farms and went to a one-room school taught by her mother. On the phone, I hear Marjorie, who is 90
years old but very very sharp, say that she never met anyone better educated
than my mother: because “she loved to learn” and was “so curious.” The hours flew by. It was a connection. I sat in Mom’s rocker, sipping a cup of tea,
looking at the Kool penguins—celluoid cigarette advertisements—in the corner
cupboard that came from Jersey, listening to a voice Mom listened to lots of
times, dredging up old knowledge (Anne was adopted, Jack was a lawyer and a
judge, they lived in Cotuit and belonged to same country club on the Cape where
Jackie Kennedy did). If only I had a
Kool to light up, I’d almost be my mother, sitting, saying yes, oh yes, mind
drifting away to all the things she’d have to get done and to the woods with
the dog, getting off the phone to state that Marjorie always was “a bit of a
pain in the ass.” Truth is, I wanted to
talk about Mom. The greater truth is, I
wanted to talk to Mom. But it was
Marjorie, and, at least, she pointed out the direction I needed to go.
By the time
I got off the phone, it was late afternoon.
My plans to walk in the woods were ruined. The day was gray and the sky threatened rain.
I pulled on my winter coat and slipped
out without the dog. I’d had a headache
all day, and I needed to be alone, to be free—not holding the end of a leash
with a corgi ball of energy on the other end.
Achy and heavy, I walked the bumpy sidewalks, crossed the park and
headed into the affluent neighborhood across from the community college, a
place bereft of poetry. My brain was
grinding away about nothing worth mentioning, nothing I remember hours later,
and half way through the route, I made a decision to stop thinking. No more analyzing. Analysis is a defense. Against what?
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll know when I stop doing it. Somehow, I stopped my mind and just
looked. I looked at the houses and felt
nothing. I’d hoped to learn from and
talk to the lake, the trees, the frogs, the snakes. But here there was just house after
house. Well kept yards. Nothing to feel. Until I looked up. Against the gray sky I saw the limbs of trees
looking less sharp, a little fuzzy around the edges, a little rosy, and, unless
I imagined it, breaking out in light green fuzz at the ends. The wood (even here) is coming alive. The branches are lifting themselves up. The first flowers are breaking through the
hard earth. All creation is groaning to
be reborn. Me, too. Looking at real things, I began to feel
strange sensations in my body—the body I’ve forgotten. It’s still here, stronger than ever. I go days without changing my clothes, weeks
without shaving my legs. But last night
I poured warm water over them, and remembered what it felt like to sit in a
Turkish bath. I smoothed lotion all over
my body. Legs are stronger than
ever. No sign of slowing down except a
pain in one knee when I take the stairs.
I’m ready for another pilgrimage.
I cross the road, and peek through the iron fence that safeguards the
UMF chancellor’s house. The lilac bushes
have buds at the end of every stem with green tongues sticking out between the
woody lips. As I look at them, the misty
rain isn’t annoying any more but opens me, too.
I run across
the street at the sight of the white pine on the opposite side of Burroughs
Park. Like my dog, Panda, I race down
the hill and across the open space to stand as close as I can to that pine. Below is a skirt of orange needles and I stretch
up tall. The yard and the woods at Mom’s
house were full of pines, and suddenly I am home.
Next, I know
I have to visit the sycamore. In New
Jersey they are called buttonwoods. This
one is a beauty. There’s a very thick
and sturdy bough, low enough to climb. A
perfect perch for watching the park and the stream. I love the way Sycamores lose their shaggy
bark the higher they climb, some becoming pure white and ethereal looking. This tree is almost Cyclopean with its one
eye hole or is it a mouth? I peer in,
playing with it. Talk to me, tree, tell
me I have Jersey sand in my shoes. Tell
me that Mom is still in Jersey and in New York and here with me in Flint.
Last stop is
the grandfather oak that has probably been here for over a hundred years. This whole area before it was settled was oak
savannah, and right up Crapo Street was a sanatorium called Oak Grove. This tree and those on the lawn of the public
library began growing before Flint was settled in the 1830s, when Indians
walked and trapped and traded. Before
the factories. Before the colleges. Long before me and all my losses.
Three
trees. White Pine, Sycamore, and
Oak. Three homes.
I didn’t
expect anything of this walk when I started, but by silencing my busy brain, I
began to see real things and those real things told me things about the
continuity of home. My book was Trees,
three chapters of trees. Suddenly, I
recall how much Mom loved trees. When we
were very young in our Sylvan Avenue house, we had a red pine right behind our
property line. We called it “the tallest
tree” around, and it was. You could see
it for miles. One day, men from Niagara
Mohawk, the power company, said it had to come down. With it came our tree fort. We were at school when it happened, and, apparently,
my mother stood her ground and fought with those men from the power
company. She tried to save the tree.
By the time
she died, her spruce tree in the front side yard (planted from a sapling
brought from New Jersey) was so tall she joked that if it ever had to be cut,
it should be sent to Washington D.C. to be the National Christmas tree. When I’d come home to visit her in the
assisted living place and then the nursing home, she always wanted to go out in
the car, and then she wanted to drive home (or up West Mountain or up to
North). The last year, she was too frail
to get up the porch steps and into the house, so I’d get lawn chairs and we’d clump
up under the low-hanging boughs of Mom’s spruce. I still can see her sitting there drinking
ice tea and happy that Peg Tulley from across the street was coming over with
her little dog. The tree became our
home.
 |
| Under the spruce tree was like sitting at Mom's kitchen table |
Two weeks
ago, my sister sent the link to the Realtor’s site with Mom’s house for
sale. It didn’t look like the same
house: stripped of its cedar shakes, it
was sided with new and boring aluminum, and, much worse, it was denuded of the
ancient trees—rhododendrons and hemlocks—that fronted the sidewalk and made it
cozy. Whoever cut those old trees would
have put down their steel saws had they seen the wall of pink blooms the
rhododendrons made in June. I was afraid
to text Jen, “I hate to ask but did they cut down Mom’s spruce?” No answer.
A week later, I texted my brother, who said “Trees had to be cut. Everything was way over grown.” “Did the
spruce get cut?” “Yes,” was all he
replied. “Awful.” I still don’t know whether they took the
crabapple in the center of Mom’s yard.
It bloomed when she died, snowing pink on the windy night when we went
to toast her with shots of scotch at her kitchen table and smoke the Kools that
were left in a carton in the refrigerator.
Mom nursed that crabapple through outbreaks of fungus, tent
caterpillars, old age, and it kept blooming for her.
 |
| Mom's crabapple--so what if it blocks the house |
She had a
way with trees, and her yard was a collection of specimens from all the places
that she loved. I hadn’t realized before
I walked today that I needed to grieve the death of Mom’s trees. They should have stayed. She grew them. But she grew me, too. And here I am, Mom, making a collection of
trees in my own different way on the first day of Spring since you left the
world. But I think there’s a little of
you still here in me. Help me to grow
that, Mama. She replies, “Go easy,
honey. Go easy.” Her password.
Her secret. Her wisdom. “I always said, you analyze too much.”
