A Rare Visit to a Very Old, Beloved Friend
A story of belonging in a beautiful, blessed and broken world
Winter Finally Came
A few days ago, I sat wrapped in a blanket with a steaming mug of coffee, watching the early morning sky brighten into winter dawn from the warmth of my couch. Winter had come on suddenly after ten weeks of what felt like perpetual November, and our December had been mostly rain and clouds and mud. During the second weekend in January, we suddenly went from temps in the Fahrenheit 40s to below zero with lots of snow and lashing wind. For the better part of last week, temps wavered on either side of 0 at night and during the day we had been having beautiful, bright sun with temps in the single digits to low teens. It was the kind of week when, despite the cold pressing in through the windows, you really just had to throw the curtains open, and let the golden beams stream in from the south. On most of those mornings there was a fresh layer of white snow to wake up to, and I was plunged into a kind of wistful nostalgia for the snowy, cold winters of my youth.
As I sat watching dawn arrive that morning, the frigid air outside was 6°F. I watched pinks coalesce in bands of cloud as the sun rose, and had the sudden urge to get out there and walk among the particular beauties of a very cold winter morning. I also remembered that I had a dear old friend to visit and, in recent years, it is only during the coldest winter weather like this that I can actually get myself to where they stand.
I bundled into all my woolies and down, activated a couple of hand warmers to add to my mittens and drove to the woods and wetlands on the grounds of a local university, land that had once been a large rambling estate in the possession of a 20th Century auto baron. That’s where my friend, a very old Maple tree, lives.
I had a dear old friend to visit and, in recent years,
it is only during the coldest winter weather like this
that I can actually get myself to where they stand.
How This Friendship Grew and What Became of It
The wooded back campus of our local university is a place I have known since I was a child with a mother and step-father who studied and worked there. We lived near those woods for a summer, subletting an old, creaky, red farm house owned by the university, far away from the main university campus.
It was a hard summer for my ten-year-old self, an only child who was going through the less-than peaceful aftermath of a rancorous divorce between my parents. I was uprooted and adjusting to a new life, and deeply missing my dad. I spent many of my days that summer rambling alone, or with my dog on the many trails that led through the woods and fields that surrounded the house. That was how I found the old maple tree that became a dependable refuge and then a long-time friend.
The tree was wasn’t far from our house, and it was very climbable. Once up, it offered a variety of places where thick limbs grew to form comfortable, woody seats. For the remainder of summer, I would pack a peanut butter sandwich and a book into my little blue knapsack and make my way to a comfortable spot in those branches. Up there, I felt sheltered and held, and I gazed out at the beautiful, buzzing, green, living world around me, and I felt that I was a part of it.
Up there, I felt sheltered and held, and I gazed out
at the beautiful, buzzing, green, living world around me,
and I felt that I was a part of it.
When we moved to a house in town at the end of the summer, I didn’t see the tree very much for several years until I returned as a student at the university. Then, it provided ample seats for myself and a group of gangly young friends, carrying various musical instruments and other substances. We sang and played music up in those branches late into the night, one time breaking into a chorus of howls as the full moon rose.
I continued visiting the tree regularly in the years it took me to get through college while working my way through and changing my major a couple of times. Eventually I brought the young man who would become my husband, and he loved the tree too. Several years later, when we had two kids who were old enough to climb with a little help, we brought them there every so often. We’d all perch up there in the branches, enjoying the embrace of the maple, and having fun together.
Then, in the late nineties, the board of trustees for the university accepted a very significant donation from a wealthy donor, who offered it with the provision that they commit to using a sizable portion of it to build a large and rambling golf course on that back campus. Most of the woodland was clear cut to construct the 700 acre course. A few patches of the old hardwood forest, cleaved from the living community where they had grown and thrived, were left in place as natural features for the golfers to enjoy.
The old maple tree was in an area at the edge, so not touched, and there were still two, barely connecting sections of the forest that amounted to 110 acres of woods and remnants of fen that were set aside and designated as the BioPreserve. However, the land was deeply disturbed and altered indelibly. In the 25 years since, the borders of the woods have become brambly with weedy volunteers, some considered alien to the landscape, like Multiflora Rose, Wineberry and Autumn Olive. Poison ivy is a frequent member of that edgy community of viny, poky, itchy, industrious growing things that arrive to fill bare soil after human disturbance, and most of them actually serve in ways that keep the soil there and help to regenerate it.
This thorny green borderland community, in part, enacts a kind of poetic eco-justice, setting up a protective barrier between humans and what is left of a fractured community. They are like feral dogs who bare their teeth at those who resemble destroyers: people who are unaware that their own lives are entwined with the lives they so callously razed, for something as trivial as acres of archaic, perfect green turfgrass, and sport for the gentry. (If I sound a little disgusted, it is because I am.)
The Journey In: Tracks, Brambles, Ice and Tree
The snow crunched loudly in the bitter cold as I walked down a dirt road and then a foot path that would take me near the old Maple. My boot tracks mingled with those of the the other creatures: squirrel, bird, vole and deer tracks. At regular intervals there were precision holes dug down to the soil as squirrels had been industriously digging for buried acorns. I thought of them feeling the pang of hunger in their bellies as they labored for calories in the arctic air.
As I surveyed the snow for more tracks, I saw a much smaller, vole-sized hole in the snow with tiny footprints leading away from it. Abruptly, those tracks stopped, turned and headed back, one long blur of snow revealing its flight as that small soul must have run as fast as it could, likely in response to a winged shadow from overhead— hawks are hungry too. By the looks of the terminal divot in the snow, the vole will live to find its own meals. As Mary Oliver invited us to consider: “it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.”1
. . . it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.~from “Invitation” by Mary Oliver
From the foot path, I turned and walked into a stand of very old pines. Many years ago they had surrounded the Gardener’s House, which became dilapidated and was taken down when I was an undergrad student. It was built to shelter the hired gardener for the estate that this university had once been. At the far edge of the pines a wall of bramble and brush at least 20 feet in thickness lay between me and the Maple. I began my long, slow and thorny journey in, often getting down on my knees, and holding up the prickery branches, doing my best not to tear my down coat.
Slowly but surely I inched my way through, pausing now and then, when there was space to do so, to assess and plot my next move. At one point, I was discouraged and thought I might not make it through this time. It seemed so much worse than last year’s growth! And then, I noticed a clearing to my left and made my way to the hospitality of the icy surface of the wetland, totally grateful for the solid and clear way to the base of the mound where the tree stood. I relished the open space, even with the worrisome way the thin top layers of ice crackled. I knew I was safe, as the foot or so of water underneath was immovable in this cold. Only a bit more brambles at the edge, and I was there, past the fortress wall and through the moat.
The Maple had lost few limbs since I was there last, and they laid where they had fallen. I went to it and touched its craggy bark with my bare hands, circling it, looking up at the sky through its branches, closing my eyes and pressing my cheek into its cold, rough trunk. I blessed and kissed the tree, and I felt blessed to be there with it, remembering and celebrating all the years of knowing it.
I didn’t climb the Maple as I used to, it has grown and I have aged. It’s a lot harder to get up there! So, I laid quietly on the hillside, breathing out small clouds and looking up through its branches at the morning sky. I stayed until my toes were getting numb.
The old Maple is steadfast, surrounded by the bramble wall and water. In its strength and generosity, it has been a beloved tree to many, not just me and those who came with me. It used to be very easy to see it from the trail and walk right up to it. Someone had carved a heart into its bark on one side, many, many years ago, tattooing their love upon it. I like to think it was love for the tree because there are no initials announcing a youthful crush etched within that heart’s boundary. It’s evident by the creaturely tracks around it that it isn’t alone, it has the company of deer, birds and many other woodland, wetland creatures. But as I laid there on the snowy ground looking up at its generous spread of branching arms, reaching toward the light of the sun, it seemed like there was a kind of loneliness surrounding it. I wondered if the tree missed people as it lived on behind its fortress and moat. Was it wistful for common, loving human creatures that it once knew in abundance and held in its arms?
Some would say that a tree doesn’t feel. And some would assert that if it does feel in some way, the tree is probably relieved to be set away from people in this world filled with the ruins of destructive human folly and hubris. Some Indigenous people might remind us that people and trees have loved one another for a very, very long time and are entwined in kinship. Many of us with settler-colonial roots have forgotten this. But have the trees?
When we know that we belong together, that we are kin,
all of us fashioned from star dust, humus
and mysteriously breathed into our lives,
there might not be so many moats and thorny walls.
When we know that we belong together, that we are kin, all of us fashioned from star dust, humus and mysteriously breathed into our lives, there might not be so many moats and thorny walls. As I made my way back across the ice, and followed my own tracks through the places where the brambles were thinner, I decided that maybe it would be a good idea to bring some pruners back with me in the early spring and open a wider door in the brambles for the sake of love and belonging.
Oliver, Mary. “Invitation (excerpt)” in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, New York: Penguin Press, 2017, 107-108.
All photos by author, 2024. All rights reserved.
What a beautiful and touching piece, Michelle. I know how much the Maple means to you. ❤️
So beautiful Michelle. Reminds me of my connection to the trees on my parents property which were my “homes”❤️