Welcome Home!

My son came home from school the other day with an assignment to do as much of his family tree as he could. So we talked about my parents, and their parents, and about my great-grandmother who came to Denmark from Poland as a farm worker, many, many years ago. She died before I was born.

We put names on people he had never met, and I told him a few family stories as we went along.

As he padded off to do his thing, I was stuck on the couch thinking about family but also about trees.

I bet many of us have a tree that means something to us.

Perhaps it’s the tree your childhood swing hung from?

Or it could be the apple tree in your grandmother’s backyard – the one with the sour apples that she’d tell you not to eat because they’d give you a stomachache, but you ate them anyhow. And if your stomach hurt, you just didn’t tell anyone.

There’s a beautiful cherry tree in the front yard of my big old scary house. Someone must have planted it maybe 20 years ago, and I’m sure whoever did so loved the tree and its perfect tree-shape as much as I do now.

By the driveway at my dad’s house, there’s a huge old chestnut tree. It’s a horse chestnut, so you can’t eat the abundance of smooth mahogany-colored orbs it produces, but it’s a beautiful tree. It fascinated me from the time we moved out on the farm, and I still think about it in my homesick moments. A beacon of sorts, it’s been hit by lightning a few times, sending enormous branches crashing out of it, so today it’s a little lopsided. In my more prosaic moments I feel like that huge tree watched over me as I was growing up.

In my mom’s backyard grows a lanky, airy birch, and it was underneath the wispy branches of that tree that I discovered my favorite spy novel writer back in the ‘80s.

John le Carre took me deep into the Cold War games of moles and spies as I got sunburned on my back plowing my way through George Smiley’s adventures. Somehow, spies and birches are forever connected in my mind.

Today I’m thinking of which tree to plant in my own yard. My heart is with beech and birch trees, but my front yard is dry and sunburned. Another favorite is the tree I call a larch but around here it mostly goes by tamarack.

At some point this summer I’ll make up my mind, dig a big hole and plant a tree. And that’s the tree that will be watching over me and my big old scary house project for the next many years. Let’s hope it will not get hit by lightning.