By Lenna Suminski
I grew up around forests, things change when time passes and people get older and muddier. To the right of my house that my mother’s mother built on top of her mother’s bones, there used to be a road that led to nowhere. I learned to bike down that dead end, howling like wolves, armed with pink plush handlebars and not-so-flashy training wheels. They built a bridge across that
valley and unrooted all my grandfather’s bamboos. Now teenagers do motorcycle tricks down my street and they had to build up a higher fence on the bridge because people kept taking their leaps of faith. Courage and solitude comes in many forms. I used to swim in the creek they decomposed in.
I am not allowed to run barefoot across dandelions anymore.
But before all this death, there had to be life. This is not a story about growing up, I’ve hardly ever grown.
I want to tell you about a tree, before the bridge, before the fences. The tree was tall, expansive, wise, and giving. Just across from my window, it sprung white flowers over and over again every spring. My mother could not bake but she’d make tea from the fancy rose Earl Grey we’d get from the city every other Saturday. I made daisy chains and swung from its branches. The day before it was cut down–this older-than-any-bridge tree–I saw my mother and my father kiss for the very last time.
Tree-climbing was a talent of mine, my first and only nickname was ‘xiao monkey’ (small monkey). I have never fallen. My feet will forever be rough and tough from my refusal to wear shoes.
My ama, my mother’s mother, taught me everything I knew. She’d seen more death than me. The house across from ours used to be a pond to catch frogs and catfish in. Her tiny frame grew stubbornly, like the pink flower weeds she taught me how to peel and eat, when nothing but tea came from the red dirt of her mountain land.
My agong, my mother’s father, was more like me than anyone would like to admit. He died when I was too young to understand his empathy. I used to detest holding his rough, tough hands. He planted a tree – well, many other trees too. But he planted a tree for my mother, Mayflower Tree. It was taller than my window. I’d learn to climb its ridges down and over the fence to see my high school boyfriend at a party many bridges away.
He planted it for her, it’s been seven years since he was suffocated by cancer and the tube but his tree snowed white flowers across my home-built-on-bones for eternity. Only in May, he gave us
remembrance. In second grade we read a poem about mayflowers and I picked the most pristine ones from my yard and brought it to school. I’d never been more proud.
These are my flowers. It came from my mother’s tree. Inhale their loveliness.
I did not cry when he died, slowly and disgustingly. But I wallowed in agony the winter following the buddhist lotus-flower that we made and burned for him, when ama and mama cut down the Mayflower tree, and all the other trees.
They will grow back, Lenna.
No, it will never be the same.
When I was nine, my classmates presented in excitement a dying baby black crow that had fallen from our school yard’s tree. They herded around it like vultures, gawking, squawking, overwhelmed by our pure biological voyeurism. Ponytails and buzzed heads and scraped knees crowding the crows body. When they all left I held the baby bird in my lavender-printed white dress. I banged on every door and skipped my classes, nobody really had the time to entertain my silliness of trying to save a dying thing.
I laid against the tree of its nest and we looked at each other until it died. I whispered some lullaby, I’d never been a good singer so I told it the story of trees. Then I laid with its body, its hair as black as mine, listening to the tea trees and the red dirt that was never rich enough to grow anything but bamboo and weeds.
It was the closest I’d ever been to death. I’ve hardly grown since. I talked about the mayflowers and crossed my heart like it was a prayer. In the name of memory and belief, the closest I’d ever been to God.
