The Hope Tree

 Once upon a time, I planted an oak tree. I read somewhere that "He who plants a tree plants hope" and I desperately needed a little hope.

It was a tough time back then and dark. My marriage of over 20 years was slowly and painfully falling apart. My kids were growing up and moving on with college and lives of their own. But I read that line...I don't even remember where, and somehow it rang a bell.

Fairly often, I used to walk up on the hill behind my house to clear my head and calm my shaky self when I wasn't working. Home was a place full of turmoil so sometimes I'd just walk. I remember thinking at times that the house itself must have been evil because so much bad had happened there. So I'd walk.

I can't remember how or why but one day while I was trudging along, I spotted a tiny little oak twig with just two leaves on it poking out of the brush along the road. It looked so fragile and small but there it was...two green leaves on a six inch stick holding it's own against the thorns, goldenrod and burdocks. In some crazy part of my mind, I thought it looked defiant. In a leap that I still can't explain, it looked like hope.

So I went home, got a garden spade and carefully dug the little guy up. I didn't know what to do with it but after walking around the yard puzzling for a while, I picked a spot sort of in the middle of the vast, unused expanse of grass in the front and dug a tiny hole to plant it. It looked completely lost and alone out there, far from the spot where some squirrel had probably buried an acorn and its almost transparent leaves first caught the sunshine. But I pulled some of the crabgrass away from it, put a ribbon on a stick next to it so I wouldn't accidentally run over it with the lawn mower and crossed my fingers.

At that moment, it became my Hope Tree.

I really didn't think it would make it I suppose. I didn't do much except mow around it and pull the weeds that tried to choke it out. A winter passed and to my surprise, that little stick put out four leaves. The rabbits or a deer ate a couple of them and I thought that was it but by summertime, there were a couple more.

Winters and summers came and went. I walked up on the hill less and rode bicycles more. The Tour became a thing and kept me occupied enough to keep moving through some bad times. I didn't think about hope much.

I'd mow the grass around my twig and water it once in a while when summers got dry. Sometimes I'd just walk out there and check on it...shoo the Japanese beetles off and see how it was doing. Four leaves became a dozen and I no longer needed the ribbon to see where it was when I cut the grass. To my delight every spring, what looked like a dead stick stuck in the ground would pop out some buds and turn green again. I never so much as put a fence around it to keep the bunnies and deer away from it but there it was...still defiant.

So now, all these years later, the little tree is almost what could be called a sapling. It put down roots and true to its kind, keeps growing slowly but steadily. It's holding it's own among a bunch of other trees we've planted since. Someday, there will be a grove of companions...maples, other oaks, hopefully a sycamore or two, some birch and a few black walnuts that the squirrels keep planting for me.

But that one feisty little oak in the middle will be my Hope Tree always. Without knowing why or how, it filled one small empty place in my life when the whole world was black.

My favorite twig has gotten to be a couple of feet tall now. I think the runt of the litter is here to stay for well and all and that makes me happy. I know I will never see it reach its fullest size but I hope someday to walk in its shade and look up at it instead of down. I can picture it in my mind, grown to a tower with a vast crown of leaves and branches, full of birds and giddy squirrels, spreading out huge and giving life to that empty useless lawn. 

Once upon a time I planted an oak tree. It became a symbol of so many things to me...hanging on when I thought I couldn't, watching for a new start every season when everything looked finished, seeing something green again when the black was everywhere. 

And I want my kids to know I did that and why. I began something that will live long after I've gone. It won't live forever anymore than I will but it'll be a memory of something I did for many, many years. From something so small, came something so big. 

Life, memories and a little bit of the future.

It is a Hope Tree after all.