Trees
My husband was born in Kansas, but he moved to Wyoming a couple of years before he started school. He was the middle child of school teacher parents, so he began Kindergarten with one foot already on third base. What he hadn’t been taught, he’d overheard, and what he hadn’t actually done, he’d watched. So, no one really should have been surprised at his response when early into semester one of organized schooling, his teacher asked the class to name the four seasons. A simple question to which he supplied an obvious answer: “Duck, Quail, Pheasant, and Deer.” One really ought to be more specific if wanting to talk about temperature and trees.
Nature’s seasons are God’s playground. Some years, He does a series of back flips and sometimes just a cartwheel or two. Predictably unpredictable overtures are His modus operandi, with no summer fade to fall ever turning out exactly like the one before. As a kid, I loved summers best. Summer was for riding bikes and going swimming and playing softball and going to camp. It was the no school zone of freedom where we made memories out of dirt and rocks and weeping willow trees. The kind of memories that you box and wrap with a ribbon to put on a keep forever shelf. We are never more who we really want to be than under the promise of summer’s sun.
But at heart, I’m a sucker for fall.
I love fall for lots of reasons from the superficiality of oversized sweatshirts and college football to the metaphorical application of transitions and passages of time. But I love it most, I think, for the stage it sets for trees. From the towering cottonwoods that flanked my grandparents’ creek to the crowded pecan grove that marked the edge of the little town I grew up in, trees have always been billboards of sorts for me. Links to people and places and memories, as well as teachers and as models of who and what we can and cannot be.
In Oklahoma, blackjack oaks grow in clumps like little families, their collective intertwined branches leaning in unison, over time, as they naturally chase the sun. Blackjacks have a lot to teach us about resilience and not being needy and thinking about others as you go.
In Oklahoma, blackjack oaks grow in clumps like little families, their collective intertwined branches leaning in unison, over time, as they naturally chase the sun. Unless you look at their trunks, it’s hard to tell where one stops and another begins. Occasionally, one will sprawl as it grows creating a slight canopy on its own, but mostly any shade they provide is a group effort, at least around here anyway. Blackjacks live simple lives-- mostly appreciated, rarely demanded, and yet, unceremoniously essential to those of us who have them in our yards. They’re tough and stubborn because the Oklahoma weather makes them be, and when they’ve done their deal and are ready to die, they do that as simply and predictably as they lived. When blackjacks go, they usually go slowly, from the ground up, branch by branch through the years until, ultimately, they look like a skinny old man with a tuft of hair on top. It’s as if they want to warn us so we won’t be caught off guard.
Blackjacks have a lot to teach us about resilience and not being needy and thinking about others as we go.
In California, the redwoods grow in forests, unlike blackjacks, for seemingly ever. Some live as long as 2000 years—or more. They also dwarf our oaks in size. Some soar so high that when you stand at their base you can’t even see their top, and some grow wide enough to park a car inside. Redwoods grow en masse like a fraternity of friends, shooting up side by side as if to say, “We’re all in this together”. Whatever ‘this’ might be. And ‘this’ is often a lot when you live on the California coast. These majestic wonders of the world are undoubtedly breathtaking to behold, however, they are fascinating for reasons beyond what we see above the ground. You would think that trees that tall and that heavy would have root systems that wrap around the very core of the earth--deep, deep anchors that could support the giant mass that stands. But they don’t. Their root systems don’t really grow down at all, they grow out. And they wrap around each other. So, when the earth quakes and the storms rage, they hold each other up. That’s how they stand the test of time. Only nature could be that prescient. We might be a lot better off, if we took a cue from them.
But the most impressive tree of all trees, is perhaps, the Douglas fir. And that’s not because I decorate a fake one in my living room in December. Douglas firs grow mainly in coastal ranges where they’re sensitive to drought and picky about their soil. They love the sides of mountains and space so they can stretch, where they grow independently, almost identically to one another. Their tight, spiraling green needles grow thick and soft and empirically, as if they were designed to hold pretty things in their arms. I suppose that’s why we manufacture them in droves. While I love how the Douglas Fir looks as it lives, I am enamored by what it does when it dies. When a Douglas fir dies, there is an explosion underground. Its root system sends out nutrients and disease inhibitors in every direction as far as it can reach, fortifying whatever is in its path, its death becoming a life changing B12 for every living thing within its reach. If Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree” were a made for tv movie, it would be based upon the life of a Douglas fir.
I have a favorite tree in Norman. It stands in a pasture on northeast Franklin Road just kind of out there doing its deal while the world around it turns. We’ve had tornadoes and floods and ice storms and droughts, and no matter what, that brazen old oak just stands. Wise and present, like a mentor or a parent or a friend. It’s a beacon of strength, an anchor in a topsy turvy world, and a reminder that significance isn’t respective, you can be great wherever you grow.
The maples that I’ve planted in my yard to fill in for the dissipating blackjacks are starting to turn now. Some are red and some are yellow, but most are still somewhere in between. And I know that in the weeks ahead, some will wow and some will fizzle. That’s the way it always goes. But one will surprise me. It will come out of nowhere like the lone pine on the side of the mountain that grows in the rocks as if someone didn’t tell him the rules. One will just turn neon. And I will smile as I remember, it does so because it can.
Sherri Coale