Learning how to age with trees

Somewhere around the age of 27 my parents got old.  I’m not quite sure exactly how and when it happened. I was visiting home for the Thanksgiving holiday when I noticed the gray in my dad’s beard.  As if over night, the gray had spread to every hair on his chin and head.  Of course, the graying process had been going on for some time, but it was that Thanksgiving I noticed it.  A great sadness came over me, and an anxiety set in that has since never left. 

If we are lucky, we live blissfully unaware of the devastation that time can wreck on our heart and souls for many years.  With the exception of our pets, who share a seventh or eighth of our life, many of the humans in our lives stay with us for a considerable amount of our time on this earth. And we hope those humans closest to us will share all of our time on this earth.  But time can be cruel.  It both giveth and taketh away. 

We cope with the aging process in different ways.  Some of us look to the timelessness of human-contrived things, like music or art.  While others look to the natural world.  We grasp on to starry night skies, oceans, or mountains, anything that will anchor us in this time and place and keep us from uncontrollably flying off into the dark abyss of the time-space continuum.

My anchor has always been trees.

Since a little girl I have regarded trees as magical beasts.  Many of them outlive us, and they gracefully observe the passage of our existence.  My childhood home was surrounded by old red oaks.  I grew up under those red oaks.  I played “catch the leaf” under them in the autumn.  I cried under them, I played under them, I lived under them.  They were as constant as the load-bearing walls in our home, holding up the forest and sky.  They were the stage of my being for many years.  During the early years we would have strangers knock on our door to share stories about the largest of the red oaks in the back.  One older woman reminisced with my dad about family reunions under that tree.  It was a treasure, a constant.  Of course trees do not live forever, and a few times we had trees struck by lightning.  We lived on one of the tallest hills south of Atlanta, and the lightning could not resist our closeness to its resident clouds.  We lost three beautiful red oaks in my childhood, and each one was a true loss.  Their removals made us feel naked, as if a piece of our home had been taken away by God himself. 

However, the majority of those red oaks, water oaks, and Pecan trees too stood the test of time, at least in my 30 years of living on North Davis Drive.  They were there when I discovered my passion for nature, when I prevailed through the awkward years of puberty, when I went off to college, when I came home from college (unemployed), and when I got married.  Those dear trees never left me.  They were there through the biggest of life changes.  They have anchored me at my most vulnerable. 

I could make this essay about how noble a creature I consider the tree.  I could tell you that they are selfless and giving.  I could tell you that one mature tree provides enough oxygen on which two humans can subsist for a year.  I could tell you that I often do not think we as humans deserve trees.  But this essay is not about what trees can do for us and how we should feel little in their presence.  Rather this is an essay about how trees and nature can be celebrated for the life and sanity they provide us in our most vulnerable of times – how trees have, at the very least, been my sanity through watching my parents age and a changing world.

I am preparing for my next visit to see my folks.  I have Christmas presents wrapped and cookies baked.  I am thrilled to see their faces when we walk into their home, exhausted and irritable from the trip down I-40 in holiday traffic.  They will welcome us with open arms into their new home in the North Carolina mountains.  It will be the first Christmas celebrated in their new house, and I will not have my familiar trees to keep me company.  However, I plan to make friends with the new trees in their backyard.  Their presence will be a reminder of nature’s protracted time and in that reality I will find comfort.  I will see the white of my dad’s beard and the unsteadiness of his gate, and I will feel comfort.  For his aging is not too unlike a tree’s.  He is embarking on “mature tree” status when it gets harder to recover from wounds and the common flu.  It will be more difficult for him to bounce back from life’s trials.  But his roots are strong and they have a lasting stronghold on my heart.  He may be unsteady in the wind, but I will be here to be his crutch.  And when it is all too much, when the tree analogies only make the hurt of aging loved ones harsher, then I will simply take a walk in the woods.  For it is there I will find the peace of nature and her constant.  It is there I will be anchored on this earth and comforted in the pain and fear that time can so harshly give.  In time’s taking, my walk among the trees will be my giving.  And together somehow we will be made stronger in the aging. 

To my trees that always give, I love you.  And to time, who can threaten to take so much away, I honor you and will grace your presence with sturdy heart.  May my roots be the witness of my loving and my enduring.