Trees: An Allegory, An Ode

I finished a book this week called Greenwood that I really loved. It tells the story of a family, the Greenwoods, starting in 2038. We open with Jake Greenwood and walk backwards in time, learning about the previous generation, then the one preceding, and again the one that came before. Then, when we can sort of get a sense of where much of this family’s trajectory started, we start walking forward again to fill in the gaps and see how all of these individuals’ decisions were impacting people down the line, even if it was impossible to know that at the time.

So much of this book spoke to me and made me think about my life, but two passages specifically go along with some thoughts I’ve been having about a couple members of my family. The first comes from Liam, Jake's father. He's a woodworker with difficult relationships with some of the people around him. In a tough moment, he comes to a realization:

“Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure.”

Just a few weeks ago, before I read this book, I told my friend about how much I admired my grandmother because of how many hard things she had to do. Doris was her name, and she died when I was 10.

Doris and her three children.

Doris raised her kids mostly on her own, pursued a master’s degree during the summers when she wasn’t teaching, and remained faithful in the gospel in an era where broken families certainly weren’t the norm. That her children grew up to be happy and successful is no small triumph. And that Doris was able to do so much after a tumultuous childhood is also miraculous. She was only two years old when her mother died (a victim of the Spanish flu in 1918), and her grandmother raised Doris and her sister for the six years before suddenly dying too. Doris and her sister then went to live with their dad, who they weren’t close to.

Given that I was so young when my grandma died, I don’t have a lot of memories of her, just some flashes of her little Nissan Sentra and the brown carpeting of her modest trailer home. I remember her as very mild mannered and sort of nervous. I’m grateful for the stories I’ve been told and her writings that have filled in so many gaps and demonstrate her resolve and will.

Mom and me at work around 2013.

I think also of my mother, Kathi, Doris’s youngest child. You’d never guess by her cheerful attitude that she’d had a dad that ran out on her family when she was small, or that they’d had such little money. She didn’t let two cancer diagnoses ruin her life (not even the one that actually killed her). And considering she didn’t have a model of a healthy romantic relationship in her home growing up, she seemed to have made a pretty wonderful marriage. Thirty five years of partnership is hardly nothing, much less the three children it yielded that, in my eyes, have all turned out to be pretty decent people (I might not be impartial on this though...).

I like that Liam’s idea is that life can be shown as accumulating tree rings—years of drought or burns apparent alongside the rich and rain-filled years. It’s a way of illustrating the whole of a person’s lived experiences. I imagine the tree rings of both Doris and Kathi being immensely beautiful, even in seeing the hardships they endured. Beautiful, perhaps because they endured and now show those marks instead of succumbing to the challenging elements of life.

Though it’s unfortunate, I take a lot of heart in thinking that the three of us have all gone through the loss of a parent in some form, and earlier than most, only because it means I’m in good company. But knowing that they both went on to not just live but thrive means that’s a possibility for me too. And while the rest of our individual struggles are probably pretty different given the varying eras in which we were born, genders, social impacts, personality components, etc., I feel so heartened that I come from a line of people that have risen to live good lives in spite of hardship, not just because of the lack thereof.

Later in the book, Jake finds a connection to her departed family members. She finds “a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that came before her own.” Jake later describes the felling of a tree, and explains that as the tree senses the threat of the axe or chainsaw as it makes its cuts, the tree begins dumping its stored nutrients into its roots that are connected to all of the other trees in the forest. As it feels its end draw near, it gives what it can to those around it.

I'm sort of floored as I consider the new symbolism of a tree stump as a remembrance of a life once lived. It’s the place I can count the rings and consider the good and the bad that Kathi and Doris experienced. But I love that it is also a manifestation of what was given to the greater network of roots underground. They both fed me in ways I couldn’t understand, and continue to benefit from now almost 20 years removed from Grandma’s death, and nearly six from Mom’s.

It’s impossible to quantify just how many decisions my ancestors have made that have brought me to this very place in my life, but it brings me so much joy to consider the few things I can see and acknowledge as having a profound impact on what my part of the forest looks like right now. I offer belated gratitude to Doris for enduring years of hard work on her own to raise the people who would become my aunt, uncle and mother. They each have done so much good in this world, especially in my own life. The same goes to Mom, who demonstrated how to move through the world with grace, faith, and immense love. I took for granted what those meant when she was here and how they would shape me.

My tree rings continue to accumulate. Some have felt more scarred and weak these last few years. But there’s hope in knowing that I have within me the makings of towering old growth trees that have been where I have been and not only made it through, but were as beautiful as they were strong.