To talk about trees

This morning I took a long walk through an apple orchard I used to play in when I was growing up. I climbed a tree I used to climb and hugged its limbs. I felt its moss and asked the tree if it remembered me. When I climbed down, I hugged it for a while. Then I walked barefoot into the creek and grabbed stones with my toes. I dried my feet by rubbing them on my legs. There was mud and there were bug bites.

These are my preferred things to do when I’m alone; the quiet, private things I’ve been doing my whole life when no one is around or looking.

For the last year or so, coming home to Buffalo, where I am now, has gotten easier. Through years of therapy and somatic work and alternative medicines—things that often felt maddening and pointless, if I’m honest—I finally remember more of the totality of my childhood. I can touch the very good parts. I can remember what I wanted and needed and craved the way a child craves (through movement and action and impulse). I can remember what it felt like to be me, learning how a child learns (20 bumbling steps at a time and then pausing, in bliss without understanding what bliss is.) I can remember. I can feel it.

In middle school, there was a large cement block outside of one of the girl’s bathroom windows. I used to slide open the window and climb out to sit on it. I was well enough behaved in the classroom that teachers didn’t seem to notice or mind when I disappeared for 10 minutes.

I didn’t understand then that I was overwhelmed by the classroom—the fluorescent lighting, the noise, the fact that what we were learning mostly didn’t stick for me unless it involved reading—and trying to find some kind of regulation. I would sit and breathe in the outside air and stare at the grass and feel better.

I can remember searching for moments that felt calm like that. I can also remember feeling strange for needing them so badly.

One gift of deep adulthood is that I know to not feel strange about these things anymore. I’m the first to take off my shoes and walk barefoot; I don’t mind asking a child-like question; I will go on the swings, I will climb a good tree; I will hold my friends hands and hug them from behind and use silly voices. I will lay on the ground and stare at anything for an hour.

I can do any of this because I’ve come to understand that the world is mostly not unkind. My body just thought that was the truth or the trick of it for a long while.

Put differently: Whatever I am, or am not, I need what I need.

Or, as John Prine sang, you are what you are, you ain’t what you ain’t.

Whatever age we learn or relearn this is good.

//

I was in Virginia for a few days before coming here. My nephew turned 13 (something that seems impossible). My niece is off to college in a few weeks (also an impossibility). My other nephew met us at a winery, where he could legally drink (I remember carrying him around the National Zoo on my hip).

I convinced my dad to steal a few ears of corns from a cornfield with me because I’d always wanted to. We ate hibachi and ice cream cake in the worst suburb I can think of. My mom still won’t let herself have more than one drink.

My sister-in-law described her childhood. Her mother would drop her off in the morning at the ocean so she could go to bars, saying “There’s the ocean, you’ll be fine, I’ll see you at 5” before she left her. We ate fried zucchini and mozzarella sticks at a bar inside someone’s house in West Virginia. This year, a few days apart, she’ll turn 50 and I’ll turn 40. I vaguely thought about the years we didn’t speak to each other. I vaguely thought about how glad I am that we’re both moody and stubborn. And I thought for a long while about what it means to know someone for half your life because someone you love fell in love.

Walking into a Walmart I asked my brother how many good years he thinks our parents have left and he said 10. We both nodded and kept walking.

Whatever our collection of whatevers, they are always folding or unfolding.

//

Lately there has been softness. Kindness. Glasses of water brought to my bedside table before sleep. Long laughter. Dinner parties. Learning to make dolmas. Swimming and walks and learning old ways of new people. Road trips and the sweetest dog. Monitoring flowers and vegetables. Pulling weeds after it rains.

There have been choppier waves. Small town whispers on bar stools. Being told what’s been said even though I asked with my whole heart for it not to be said. Female anger, the kind you share with other women only, and mostly swallowing it so you don’t get called the thing again. And also because there’s not going to be an apology. Whatever, whatever, amen.

The world? The world feels like it’s moving in tornadoes and hurricanes. But I was thinking about this Adrienne Rich poem when I climbed the tree this morning:

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be
fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

//

I hope you’re taking care. And whatever your version of a cement block outside of a middle school window, I hope you go to it when you can and that it soothes you.

xo

Amanda

P.S. I super didn’t edit this one. Just letting her rip. <3