The Green Canopy

Trees and I go back a long way, millions of years, in fact, to a shared root in the evolution of life.   We went our separate ways, but as long as I can remember, I have still felt our connection.  A memory formed at five years old involved a broad-canopied mesquite tree that stood in the center of the otherwise empty back yard of my family’s raw, just-built starter house on the edge of San Antonio.  The mesquite was not a particularly satisfactory tree; it didn’t match the spreading oaks in my picture books, and its leaves were sparse and quirky- looking, but it was mine.  It provided the only shade until the trees my father planted gained some height. 

On Sunday mornings, I would wake with the light to a quiet house, with my depression-era parents still asleep.  They would have worked hard all week:  two jobs and college classes for my father, a full-time job, cooking, and sewing our clothes for my mother.  Sunday provided their only day to sleep late.   In bed, I would listen for sound, and eventually get bored and restless.  So I would unlatch the window screen in my bedroom, ease out, and drop a few feet onto the damp grass.  There waiting was the mesquite, with its circle of morning shade. Perhaps with a doll or book in hand, I played or read under the mesquite, content in my own green space and my own self.  The house would rouse after a while, and I would take my doll and book inside.  I couldn’t have put words to the feeling then, but memory suspects that those Sunday mornings provided a buffer from the struggles and tensions in the house.

In my twenties, in 1966, my husband James and I moved into our own raw, new house on the edges of Houston.  There were no trees waiting in the back yard, not even a mesquite, because this was not mesquite country.  But it was tree country, and the first things I planted in the yard were pines and willows, fast-growing and visible from almost every window.  The pines grew tall and straight and whistled when the wind blew, and the willows soon bent to the grass.  I did not know what lay ahead or what role these trees would play.

Times were prosperous in the 1960’s, so James and I were luckier than our parents.  We did not have to strive as hard as my parents had done for a house and promise of comfort.  With college degrees and jobs, we began living out the American dream.  But eventually a nice house and furniture couldn’t assuage the loneliness of a failing marriage.  For a while, my working on a master’s degree helped mask the truth of the relationship, but when James balked at my going on for a Ph.D., I had no more escape.  Two years later, the marriage ended.   In the divorce settlement I kept the house and the newer of the two cars, but making those payments would be difficult on $300 a month child-support and $360 a month graduate-student teaching stipend.  And James insisted on writing into the divorce contract that he would get the house if I missed three months’ payments, and he let me know that he would sue for custody of our four-year-old daughter Karen given half a chance of winning.  The pressure was on.  Survival required more than a quiet Sunday morning under a circle of green.

Every morning and evening, I looked out the bedroom window at the pines and willow I had planted five years before.  I loved those trees.  But on one afternoon that I still remember in all its anguish, I looked out the window and knew in my gut that these trees were not going to help me, any more than the rest of the universe was going to.  It was as if existential angst, perhaps shaped by reading Camus and Sartre and the rest of that cheery crew, combined to form the knot in my stomach.  An illness, mine or Karen’s, a car break-down, or a hundred other possible events could mean catastrophe, at least to my knotted stomach.  I was on my own. 

 Yes, I had loving parents, but I had broken with the family religion, creating a chasm of grief in them, and had fought to hold boundaries as a new mother.  While I knew they would help if needed, I had to make it on my own.  And friends—well, graduate school was too much about competition to lean on them for help.  Survival was up to me.   

So I turned to effort—my parents’, now my, most reliable way of coping.  I taught extra classes in the summer, tutored, took my lunch to school, enrolled in a free car repair class, learning how to change my own oil and do my own repairs.  Still, there was scarcely five cents left over at the end of the month.  When a neighbor and good friend knocked on the door soliciting civic club memberships at $15 a year (this was 1972, and $15 was real money), I told her I couldn’t afford it.  Uncomprehending, she replied, “Anyone can afford $15.”  “Not me,” I insisted, unashamed.  I knew what I had to do. 

Over the years, I got the Ph.D. and a teaching job, published enough to get tenure and promotions, consulted for a law firm, and eventually sent Karen to a good private college.  Just as I had budgeted money, during these years I budgeted time.  Effort was always the fall-back.  Now, years later, with my husband Thorpe in an old house shaded by big pecans and oaks, I nevertheless planted a new oak in the front and in the back.  Every morning I checked through the bedroom windows to see how the trees were doing.  They grew tall and wide, branching out and reaching up for light.   They were my comfort trees.

Different challenges arose, ones that my old forms of effort could not address.  In 2013, a year a half after I retired from teaching, Karen and wife Betty adopted a two-year-old boy through the foster care system in San Francisco.  Even the excellent social services in California could not change the fact that he came with ADHD and behavioral challenges.  Thorpe and I promised Karen and Betty that we would do what we could to support them, so we went to San Francisco periodically to give them some relief.  At times, we stayed with Henderson as much as a week, while Karen and Betty took a break from demanding careers and caring for Henderson.  Hence, a new form of effort for me, as a grandmother.  It became too easy to feel that my worry and effort could help.  I took on learning about ADHD and shared information, as much as I dared, lest I seem intrusive. This time the boundaries were ones that I, not my mother, might step across in relationship with our daughters.

The night before leaving for a visit to San Francisco, I looked out the bedroom window at the shadowy canopy of the nearest oak, moving gracefully in the wind.   I prayed, or what my pagan soul calls prayer, to my oak trees for help in being open but not intrusive, help in knowing when to be silent.   On the Saturday night before Karen had to leave for a two-week trip to Africa for her work, it was hard to know who was more upset, Karen or Henderson.  After she finally got him to sleep, she came into the living room, where Thorpe and I were sitting.  I looked at her with a sympathetic smile but said nothing, for once.   For an hour she talked about how hard it is to leave and how necessary her job is.   She talked about her love for Henderson and the effort required to care for him.  I saw afresh her strength and wisdom and spiritual grounding.  I saw how she has taken whatever I gave her and gone far beyond it.  I saw that not my effort, but only the continuing love of Henderson’s family, was required.

That night I knew I could let go.  Once in bed, I thanked my oak trees and the spirits of the universe for the gifts of the evening.  As if a voice spoke to me, I heard, “The spirits are not just in the trees, they are in every cell of your body.  You can count on them.  No effort required.”