A nursery tree no longer lives and breathes, which is sad.

                When I inventory past conversations, words passed between myself and people who wanted to know me, or who didn’t want to know me but had no choice, I seem always to used the trees that surrounded me as defining markers of my young life.  My memories are mostly dappled with the shade lent by the limbs that hung low and high over my self, my house, my family.

                My sister and I, we were so keen to grow up, to move out, to stop scraping our knees on that unforgiving bark.  But nostalgia grows clearer than even hindsight with age, and I wonder if those trees felt the sting of our abandonment. 

                I’m sure, like most things in nature that have been forgotten after humans have extracted the last droplets of use, they shrugged us off, kept reaching for the sun, sighed at the new lightness of not having us hanging from every wiry branch.

                There were two trees that we lost before they could lose us.   My sister cried and cried over the old apple, but my eyes stayed bright.  My heart hung only with the loss of my tree, the crabapple in the side-yard.

                Saying its name always made me want to pucker my face into the smallest pinch, because a crabapple was what my sister was too early on a Saturday morning.  A crabapple was what my mom was when we wouldn’t stop nudging each other under the dining room table, building diversions against our broccoli.  A crabapple was what my father was the time we fought about why I had to bring the same peanut butter and jelly in a reusable, bright blue lunchbox, so completely offensive it was in its lack of cool.  To prove my point, I slammed a door, breaking the mirror that hung from it.

                Maybe my dad was worse than a crabapple that day.

                That tree was good to us, though.  Good to our minds.  The branches weren’t knotty like the maples out front and the bark seemed inordinately smooth.  It was a gentle tree, holding us with more care than any of the others.

                We swung from it, tucking it under knees to feel the natural friction of warm wood against skin.  We built worlds out of the leafy levels.  From a lookout tower at the top of the sturdy trunk we monitored approaching pirate ships, or craned to see what the neighbors were cooking for lunch.  We retired to royal chambers in the crooks of outstretched branches that cupped our small bodies like gentle wooden palms.

                Once, we broke off one of her biggest arms.  It was me and the oldest of the neighbor boys, hanging like apes and giggling until there was a crack like lightning and I was crumpling onto the unforgiving ground, knee-caps first.  The tree had been so full and giving at the time, it must have been fall, so the sour red and yellow fruit rained down.  We bowed our heads for protection against it and against my mother, whose face glowed with more anger than had seeped from the wound of that fallen branch.  It was on our neighbors’ property after all, just across that invisible line.  We were disrespecting, breaking, ruining things that weren’t ours, she said.  We needed to grow up, she said.

                They don’t even climb the old thing, I wanted to say.  They’re not using it.  But I held my tongue.  Just a child and alreayd I was sharpening my instinct for self-preservation.  The sour fruit continued to fall.

                The crabapple blossomed for six more summers, and I loved it more with each.  It seemed to have timed its growth to match my own, stretching branches to parallel my height, still cradling my lazing bones with ease.   For six more summers, I hung from it, regarding it with less imagination and more awe, using it to escape, to watch unseen, to think things through in peace as a teenage girl must do.  And then a crack like lightning, but it was real this time.  I wasn’t home, but I’ve still built a memory of the moment in my head to visit: the heat rising, the raw pale insides roiling white and sappy with pain.  I would have cried if I had known, but no one thought to tell me.  The City came and chopped it to pieces small enough to push through a great chomping machine.  They carted it off in trucks perverted with the mulch of so many other deceased friends. 

                Our neighbor lost a flowerpot in the fray.  Clematis, I guess, or maybe her peonies.  I hated her after for wanting only to clean up the mess, salvage what she could.  Her husband mowed the lawn; seeded the bald spot; planted more pretty, delicate things that didn’t belong.

                Didn’t she know a tree was supposed to lie where it fell?  Didn’t she know things, real things that belonged, volunteer oak and noble fir, could grow from those bones?  Handed she seen the gorgeous whispers of bright green saplings pushing up through the warm, nurturing rot?

                There’s a plum growing there now.  I see it when I’m home for Thanksgiving, or when her grandchildren are surrounding it, shrieking for the Easter eggs someone’s hidden in its lower nooks.  It is stunted and sad.  It is rootless, its beggarly height betraying how ambivalent the ground is to its existence.

                It bears no fruit and I laugh at that.  I laugh because that nursery tree feeds someone else’s growth in someone else’s city, anonymous mulch.  I laugh because that nursery tree no longer lives and breathes for me, and that’s sad.