Prompt Entry 6

In front of my mother's house is a 50-foot cottonwood. Its branches have been trimmed away from the ground about seven feet up. From there the limbs splay gracefully, turning slightly upward, toward the sun.

Its trunk is a purposeful hug's width around. It is planted on a small mound five or six feet from the front porch where a great, old pine was thrown from the ground during a windstorm in 1997. That had been the first year my family lived in the home which I now think of as "my mother's house."

I love this tree. When I come home from whatever faraway city I live in, I stop on the way to the door to say hello to the tree. I pat its thickly grooved trunk. My voice raises a half an octave when I speak to it, as speaking to a child or a pet. More than any room in my mother's house, or the house as a totality, the cottonwood is my place. I sit on the ground below it and its roots fit my hips and back perfectly. On warm evenings when my family eats or drinks together, I perch on a chair directly below its shady limbs and bask in the tinkling melody of its spade-shaped leaves. I have, on more than one drunken occasion, cried in the arms of the tree, clung to it in early morning hours, imagined I could feel its lifeblood flowing up from the ground to the tips of its branches, begged it for mercy or good luck or a second chance.

If this seems unnatural, it's because it is. I am overcompensating in the present for past mistakes. I identify too strongly with the tree. This is the nature of abuse.

You see, the tree began its life in the gutter on the south side of the house during the summer of 1999. My mom's then boyfriend plucked it and suggested we plant it in the front yard where the pine had been lost. My brother Jim and I hated her boyfriend and thought every idea he had was worthless. Our father had gone the way of the pine the year before.

So the cottonwood was planted, and the abuse began. It looked like an awkward stick plopped in the center of a pile of earth. "Stupid fucking tree, I hope you fucking die." Jim and I took cruel pleasure in the fact that our mother no longer punished us for swearing, forgiving us the extra anger. We ripped its leaves off and shredded them in front of it. Pathetic thing, it only had nine or ten.

The next summer the boyfriend was gone. This meant that Jim and I could have friends over whenever we wanted, which was often. We sat on the front porch and took pot-shots at the tree. Travis Panizzoli rode his bike over it and took out a third of its branches. It had grown some, but we were still bigger. Anthony McCormick lit a branch on fire. Jim smashed cigarette butts on its trunk. I tore off leaves in handfuls.

"Stupid tree," I leaned over it so my lips nearly touched it and whispered, "You're a waste. No one likes you."

By the following summer, I had lost interest in abusing the tree. Instead, I treated it with the same sneering indifference that my 16-year-old self treated everything and everyone. I didn't bother to look at the tree when I came up the driveway from Sarah and Heather Simms' house every night. It could have been that I was already beginning to feel the shame; I was just too much of a coward to face it.

The tree grew. It grew and grew. So did I, so did Jim. Grew and grew and grew. I read articles about the secret thoughts of plants, about how speaking to a plant makes a difference in the way it matures. Had we harmed the plant forever? Would it have thicker branches, more lustrous leaves, fluffier and more numerous cottonballs if we hadn't treated it so badly those first years?

This is when I began to make amends. This is when I began to cling to the tree.

Have you ever harmed a thing? On accident, you can forgive yourself and take solace in your bad luck/ignorance/lack of control. On purpose, there is no forgiving yourself, only attempts to atone. Today I hug the cottonwood every time I come home, I whisper niceties to strange trees in the new cities I traverse, and I attempt to treat every living thing with respect.

I hope that is enough.