My Forever Tree

A dogwood tree grows in my front garden. It is small, somewhat peaked, somewhat scrawny. It's imperfect. That tree has watched me grow up. It watched me grow from when I was nine months old and first moved into that gray house (not the kind of gray that makes you think of dystopian forests of burned out, ash-filled air, but the kind of neutral, welcoming gray on which to paint the artwork of your life). The tree was short and delicate like the body of a baby held in her mother’s arms. It was fragile for a tree, which are usually bastions of strength. This one was small and the New England snow bowed its boughs, yet it kept standing.

I have so many pictures of me as a little kid, dressed in my American flag blouse playing "parade" outside by that tree. When my middle sister came along, we would wrap ourselves in rags from the linen closet and play "witchland" on the driveway, watched over by the tree, and of course by my mother just a shout away. My youngest sister was born, and she would play in the shade of that little tree and create big stories, and the sunlight would catch her dappled blonde hair. My parents would sit on the porch and watch as we played in the sprinkler and built tiny dams in the driveway, and the tree would blossom in the summer sunshine. I never worried and I never thought twice. 

Fall came, and then winter, and the tree became bent and twisted under the weight of the cold air. You could see the icicles forming on its branches from my middle sister’s bedroom window. The tree brushed tenderly against the side of the house, tapping, wrapping it in a green embrace. My parents had it trimmed because it had grown as I had grown and had gotten too big. It’s growing up and so am I, only people keep growing and can't be trimmed no matter how hard you try.

I'm sixteen now, and I go to school here, in Burlington. I don't see that tree so often anymore, and the days of playing games of imagination in its shade have faded into sunny memory. But still, it’s the first tree I think of when I think about trees. It’s my forever tree, and curled into the folds of its wrinkled bark are the words that write the sentences of my past.