​The Tree At The Front Of The House

I remember when the tree at the front of this house was unplanted

When I planted its sapling in the soft, wet dirt after a spring shower

I was 4 then

I remember when I watered its leaves that summer

Fearful its surrounding brothers and sisters would steal all the light the Sun had to give

I placed so carefully a rock and a piece of my mother’s mirror that had shattered when she packed her things to leave

I fed it light and love

I like to think it knew it was loved

I remember its green vibrancy when I was 13

Its arms shielding me from summer heat

After my father came home from work, we would lie on the grass under its canopy

Speaking of relatives and tales of long departed family

My father cut down its siblings during the peak of the winter in my twelfth year, when the firewood ran low, and during the spring for new fence posts

In autumn, it fed us as I had fed it

Fallen branches for tinder

I hung ghosts from the branches

The autumn smelled of pies seasoned with cinnamon

As I grew, so it followed in stride

I left for university and lived and learned

My hair grew sparse, and my hand was clutched around the hand of my own wife, and the other around a baby that bore the same name as my father and his father before him

When I was 27, my father wrapped a thick rope around my tree’s sturdiest arm

A gift for my son

To feel his feet free of the earth itself

Six summers came and went like the light tufts of dandelions in it’s wind

A day came where my father could no longer carry himself, and as such, my family and I moved in to his home

That month I added another rope and a few wooden boards

As his memory slowly took leave, we would sit and look down at his orchard at golden hour, admiring nature’s handiwork

My son would tell him about his day and school, and I would tell my son tales of long departed family members

When his legs failed him, my father would watch the birds in the tree branches from the window in the afternoon, confusing my name with his father’s and my son’s with my own

One day, we installed an air conditioner to keep him cool in the summer heat

The tree grew stronger and sturdier

When the time came, the doctor said eight years was more time than you usually get for a disease like his

When he passed, I filed the papers and dug four feet from my tree’s base

I think he would have liked to lie under its canopy and sleep there again, soaking up what light made its way through the leaves

It has been a few years now, and my son came back with a son of his own named after his father

He has our hair and eyebrows

I hear him laugh in the labyrinth of the leaves as the cool winds rustle a green symphony under the summer Sun

Together we sit now as my bones too grow brittle on the wooden swing

A family together watching a blooming orchard

Feet cutting through a bed of acorns

A blanket of lifetimes