The Cottonwood and the Gingko

Finding the Page Again

So, as many of you know, I’ve been in a recovery bubble for a few months since my son died in January and after a serious back injury that gave new meaning to pain and lying around with lidocaine patches. The strange thing about this period, unlike most of my very verbal life, is that I found it nearly impossible to come to the page, even my journal, to write.

I’m a writer, I’ve been a writer since I was in 4^th grade and wrote a poem about my sorrow when the tree people came to kill the beautiful ancient cottonwood tree just outside our picture window, a tree that I imagined had witnessed the history of the Cherokee Strip. That the tree had felt the hands of the native people who lived there before us. It had known lightning storms and survived them. It knew the blustery winds and cold and tornadoes of the Great Plains. It might have even experienced a few snowfalls, unusual for that place. Grief stricken at losing the tree, at the tree losing its life to the soulless saws and axes that befell it, I wrote my first poem. In my mind, I traced the tree through its century of life. As the fluffy bits of cottonwood danced through the air like snowflakes even after it was cut, as if refusing to desert its post just yet, I caught a few and saved them to make a small pillow for the fairies.

Through these months, I did manage to post on Substack, feeling it was important not to desert the people who’ve signed up to hear from me. I hope that my writing will inspire and encourage others. I believe deeply in supporting writers and all creative people. It keeps us going. It creates community. But the inner force of spontaneous creation I have normally experienced seemed to be taking a break.

As I write this, it occurs to me that trees are a theme now as well as when I was nine. In a previous piece here on Substack, I wrote about the gingko tree that I’d requested as a remembrance place for my son Theron in the backyard. My stepdaughter, a gardener, selected a tree and planted it in the gray cold of winter just after his memorial service. It’s situated so my windows facing the west frame it. Every day in the long winter, I trooped outside to visit the bare tree, whispering to it, impatient for it to leaf out, impatient for the spring flowers that I knew would cheer me up. IN February I tried to hurry spring and bought plants to set into the ground, to hell with the winter season. I needed to tend to alive growing things while I waited for my gingko to reveal itself. I encouraged my leafing rose bushes, all 30 of them, sprayed and fed them.

Of course, the rhythm of growing things takes its own time, as does recovering from loss. In March around my birthday, the gingko and the garden began to wake up. I caressed the infant leaves, and welcomed the budding new life. I’d entered a big decade, a lot to put my mind around, but I had no idea that the daily struggle to heal my back and heal my heart was going to flood my life, my sleep, my dreams. And render me silent.

But I know from years of therapy and being a therapist that buried within the silence is a gift. We need to become quiet so we can find the gift, and we must become patient to receive it. When there is no choice but to BE, then doing that is a way to hold my heart and my son’s and get through each day, one day at a time. In the silence, memories arise, a little blonde laughing boy, a humorous big brother to several siblings who adored him. A young man who was sensitive and loved the music his father and I had brought him up with. He taught himself the guitar and reveled in good times with our family. Then, a marriage and then they were pregnant. That’s also when he got the diagnosis of Early Onset Parkinson’s. The early times when his son was a baby were probably the most joyful of his life.

In mid-April on his birthday, my gardener daughter and I took the remaining pouch of ash and bone and sprinkled it at the foot of the gingko with its many new leaves, shaped like hearts, shaped like two halves that make a whole. We played the Beatles birthday song as he did every year for all our family birthdays, and we wiped a few tears.

The gingko is growing into a fine tree—it’s about 13 feet tall and sprouting new branches and leaves and tendrils every week. The many animals who inhabit the backyard at various times of day and night play in the dirt at the foot of the gingko, digging up bone and ash, the rocks around the tree, and generally making mischief. I place more soil on the roots and water the tree, thanking it every day for being my new friend in the garden. For its leaves and its life. In the evenings, I hang out with Theron and the gingko, the full-throated roses and new tomato plants. Life this spring will bring harvests in the autumn. The circle of time.

I continue to get treatment for my back, and I have to be very careful, but the good news is that last week my computer and I went to a café where I worked on ideas for my novel, so I’m beginning to imagine being a writer again. My journal gathers poetry and, as 56 years of memories of my son arise, I’m finding the words to capture them.

T.S. says in his Four Quartets that words break and slide, are unreliable, yet they are what we draw upon. I’m glad to be here with my few thoughts and hope they might have meaning to you in your own life. Let me know!