two feet in.

We All Need A Little Help From Our Friends: Amazing Tree #6

Friend #1 reminded me that it has been quite simply too long since I have posted an amazing tree in the overly-neglected amazing trees section of this blog.  Then, quite serendipitously, Friend #2 encountered these two coastal live oaks having a slap fight:

YOU can be Friend #3, 4 or 5!  Send me your pictures of amazing trees, amazing sky, or simply your thoughts on life, love, and global revolution (no picture required).

lemon world: amazing tree #5

Having grown up in the northeast part of our country, there are still many things about California that I just cannot get used to.  It is January, and the lemon tree in our front yard is bursting with fruit.  I do a double-take nearly every time that I walk out our front door -- there is a lemon tree in front of my house ... it is January ... lots of lemons ... something is not right.  Shouldn't everything be gray and barren and cold at this time of year?

A few days ago, I decided it was time to pick the lemons and put a basket out in front of the house so that passers-by can benefit from our abundance.   

Our tree is actually more of a lemon tree-sized bush, with branches that reach nearly to the ground.  As I was working, I decided to venture underneath the tree in order to be able to get at the lemons that grow on the nearly impenetrable, inner branches.

I ducked under the lowest branches and sat down and the ground covered with vines and fallen, half-rotten lemons.  I had entered my own private lemon world.  People walking by on the sidewalk, just a few feet away, would probably be able to see me if they were observant, but I felt hidden in a space that seemed exotic and all mine.  I kind of wanted to hang out there awhile, like a secret escape from everyday life -- something that I used to do often as a child.

Growing up, asparagus world was my favorite escape location.  If you know anything about asparagus before it arrives on your grocery store shelves, you know that in plant form it becomes rather tree-like in the first year or two of growth -- reaching as tall as 4-5 feet with fern-like crowns.  My father seemed to always be cultivating a few rows of asparagus in our garden, and I'd escape for hours underneath the ferny canopy. 

Or, sometimes I'd go to my other favorite escape location:  the rather spindly tree in the field behind our house.  Wide open field, one tree, and I'd sit up in its branches hoping not to be found.  In retrospect, that tree was about as private and hidden as the Washington Monument, but it worked for me.

Sharing these memories with some friends, I found out that I'm not the only one who had such escape spots as a child!  I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise, but as a kid you often feel like you are the sole owner of such delights.

Here, without their permission, are the details of a few other forms of lemon world that my friends remember from their lives (and, dear friends, please let me know if you want your memories removed from the prying eyes of my vast and faithful readership):

I had this little area off to the side of the front porch.  You only got there by swinging Batman style on the black iron railing over the bush and under the fig tree.  Bam, you landed behind the bush, behind the tree, above the never used steep driveway.  My friend J- and I went there when we played Batman and Robin. We would draw plans in the dirt with sticks. He always let me be Batman, for which I will always be grateful. Not a lot of kids will let you be Batman every time.

Often at a party I will still go into my own little lemon world. I hear the bustle of life going on all around me, but I am watching it through the lemons. The problem is there are no lemons and everyone can still see me. I am often escorted from the room after I scratch plans on the living room floor with a spatula.

My lemon world was a giant weeping willow next to the pond across the street from my house. I'd climb into the big crook in the trunk where three big limbs came together and sit there with a book and a snack and read and dream. But I also had a lemon world in my closet.

So, my recommendation for the day is to spend some time thinking about where you have made your lemon worlds, and whether you still have such places now as an adult.  And, if you don't have a lemon world now, it is high time to find one.

All this, from one tree in front of my house.  That's what makes it amazing.

amazing tree #4

Sometimes the best pictures seem to happen by accident.

It was pouring rain.   I was attempting to hold an umbrella, take the picture while keeping the camera dry, and stop my dog from desperately trying to reach some unseen, probably imagined, creature on the other side of the street.

The umbrella fell, the camera got wet, the dog escaped my grip, and I captured an image that makes me think of something I might see in a dream.

 

on trees, sky, and teachers

The other day a friend of mine told me that this blog reminds her of a quilt -- a bit of this and that which come together to create a unified whole.  Since I make quilts, and like to over-use the life-as-quilt metaphor, I took this as a compliment. 

Quilt-making can be either a solitary or collective act... so here is your chance to contribute.

I know that many of you out there in my vast and faithful blog audience have pictures of amazing trees or sky tucked away in some corner of your hard drive.  Now is your chance to dig them out and send them to me here.  You can submit them with or without accompanying story, poem, description, or stream of consciousness musings.  If you just want to send an image, I'll provide the text. 

You may or may not have a photograph of an amazing teacher hidden away, but you probably have one in your life.  Think broadly in your definition of teacher, find that person, take a picture and send me a short profile.

Why trees, sky, and teachers?  These can all be sources of inspiration, awe, hope, peace -- things that we all need a dose of on a regular basis. 

Today: Sunday amazing sky from our first guest contributor, Evan Nichols.

amazing tree #3

During my senior year in college I lived in an attic apartment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was tiny, cozy, and all mine. The ceilings were so slanted that you couldn’t stand up straight unless in the center where the roof peaked.

Sometimes my most enduring memories of times, places, or experiences come in the form of very specific images. Out the front window of my attic was a tree – a huge maple tree that obscured the view of the houses across of the street, of even the street itself. In the fall, the tree turned a brilliant red – a solid, deep, ruby-on-fire red. In the afternoons the sun would hit the tree at such an angle that the entire tree would glow, filling my window and the whole apartment with luminous color.

Whenever I see a tree that full and red I am transported back to that time and place. This tree comes close. Not quite full enough, and slightly too orange, but it’ll do.

amazing tree #2

It is Friday and I am feeling both time-challenged and kind of sad.  So, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to lift spirits with another amazing tree and a poem. 

This particular tree gives shelter to the afore-written-about mortars.

Optimism
by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree:  finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.  A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs -- all this resinous, unretractable earth.

(From Given Sugar, Given Salt)

amazing tree #1

This tree sits outside the window of the library where I often work. It is truly a wondrous feat of arboreal engineering – secured from wind, earthquake, or rampaging undergraduates by a complex system of cables.

Looking at it is a good way to pass through periods of writer's block.

Send me your amazing trees for future blog installments. If you don’t think you have one, then look around a little more carefully as they are not hard to find.