"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree."
- Herman Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
It is a somewhat peculiar albeit nostalgic excursion to return to one’s childhood home. No matter how long one is away for, or how frequently one returns, what remains unchanged with each visit is the distinct awareness of the familiar which is somehow entirely disconcerting at the same time. Perhaps this is because the nucleus of it all is fundamentally identical to the home you grew up in, spent your formative years, as it were, yet wholly dissimilar in a deeply unsettling and unnerving fashion.
You enter your bedroom and gone are the brightly coloured posters of long-departed performers adorning the walls; the sycophantic tributes to famous writers scribbled in marker long-since washed from the remaining furniture; the writing desk, once littered with curious knick-knacks, long ago relocated. What remains is a mere shell of the clutter and character that once breathed life into these four, now bare, walls. Where once hung an obscenely large, framed print of The Beatles ambling across Abbey Road now hangs a modest sketch of a wild cat, framed in respectable gold against a verdant backdrop.
You step outside onto the top of the stairs leading into the vast, capricious garden that lies beyond the cracked masonry of the dividing wall and perch on the edge of the peeling paint and overgrown ivy. This is the wall you broke your elbow jumping off of at age 7. Although decades have elapsed since then you can still recall the crack as your shoulder pulled back and twisted your arm beneath the weight of your body. The cast your classmates signed. The struggle of attempting to scribe with your non-dominant hand.
Your gaze is then drawn to the Mulberry tree, in all its splendour, because, oh, the secrets it houses between its ample branches. You recall the whispered giggles of sisters playing pretend. The tree not a tree at all, but rather an enchanted castle with never-ending, opulent rooms, occupied by day-dreams long since forgotten. Silkworms and tire-swings and purple-stained feet and sticky, ice-cream-stained fingers. You smile inwardly, taking in the tree, because it has certainly not lost any of its magic. The branches and leaves almost reaching out toward the house and kissing the grass beneath its shade, creating a curtain that secrets away the veiled fairy hideaway that lies beyond.
These residual reminiscences sway across the lawn and cobblestone like exultant hauntings before your eyes. Constructing dance routines with your cousins to Patricia the Stripper; rehearsing Waiting for Godot with your best friend for drama class in high school; first kisses stolen under a blanket of stars; playing catch with your childhood dog; shooting your sister with a BB gun; drunken conversations laid bare across the old trampoline; birthday parties; holidays; endless joy, laughter, tears and even grief. From the broken bones and the buried rodents to the jumping castles and rusted dinky toys in the sand.
And the palm tree, once still slight enough for you to hurdle over as a child, now more than twice your height. All this beautiful, glorious foliage, once mere saplings, now stretching their branches high into the sky, reaching for the sun. It is a rather disquieting epiphany that tends to strike at the most inopportune moments, as most have the tendency to do. That terrifying realization of the unyielding and unrelenting passage of time. Of how much time has passed. Of what has been achieved, of all your disappointments and repentances over the years.
Yet, somehow, simultaneously, through the ache of melancholy and nostalgia, that garden, those trees, the memories, like a seedling piercing through the soil, a bud of hope.
- M xx
