Communicating Authentically

In my yard, there is an elm tree almost a hundred years old. What is amazing about this tree is that during its youth, all its fellow elms died from the Dutch elm blight that left the New England landscape more barren than before. Yet this tree survived. They say this is because it was surrounded, not by other elms like itself, but by a multitude of different trees: birches, pines, maples, and apples; which, immune to the disease, kept it from spreading to the elm.

This tree is our mother, who, like the tree, lost her family to death and disease – her mother, father and sister, two husbands – who raised eight children and watched them, too, grow away from her in time, and yet still stands, proud and strong, resistant to the diseases of this world, to sadness, to loneliness, and to grief. Her land is not barren but rich with diversity and life, her children the varied types of trees that kept her whole through it all.

I think of my sisters as dryads sometimes. My oldest sister is Karla, a tall and striking white birch of a woman, whose sunlit yellow leaves have been swung and swept by the winds of change, and whose limber boughs sometimes reach toward the sky, sometimes wave passionately about, but most often reach down, with grace and good sense, resigned to her earth-bound duties, sweeping the grassy floor below. She rustles conversation in the faintest breeze, and laughs at the resisting wind, hollers stormily in the tempest. Birches are very communicative trees. Like my sister, they have an opinion on everything.

In my front yard, there is an apple tree, fragrant and gay, perfect in shape and color. She spreads her apple babies out on the ground beneath her, just as my sister Elena used to lay out her dollies to warm in the sun when she was a motherly little girl. At first glance, the apple does not seem to cast as imposing a shadow as the other trees, and it doesn’t seem as strong somehow. However, her roots are deep, and her shadow is much warmer than the others, for she has an understanding with the sun. She allows it to shine through her branches so that it falls like a patchwork quilt to the ground to warm her apple doll babies below.

My sister Alicia is a pine, her graceful feathery branches clothed in a solid strong dark green. Her limbs a never weakened by force; neither is she made brittle by cold. She stands steadfastly bearing the burden of winter, refusing to let it bend her will. At times the wind will blow her backward and she does not retreat, but instead stretches supplely and issues a tense warning not to push her too far. She is at once strong and flexible, for pines do not allow themselves to be broken.

Then there is the maple whose sweetness lies deep below her rough surface, and flows very slowly, even when properly tapped. That is me. Eager to display my strength, I stand naked through the winters of my life, my broad trunk firmly rooted, my bare arms raised in a salute of pride, my silhouette a testimony to cold solitude. Beneath it all I cry, tears so thick with loneliness and emotion that I must be cut to the core to allow them to flow. But sometimes in the summer, when no one is looking, I fly little helicopter seeds just for fun, to watch them twirl on the breeze.

You see, that is the beauty of sisters and trees. We survive because we are mutually supportive by nature. Seemingly aloof, we protect each other with our constancy and our respective strengths. We are rooted in common ground, yet each one casts a different shadow.