An ode to both the gorgeous and the grueling that speaks to the compex connections we have to those we hold most dear…
by: Mark LaMonda
I want to write about trees, but my monkey brain is thinking about my father, how I miss him. Odd, to miss what broke you. I have always had this intense feeling that I would have died if my tormentor didn’t prevent me…from being me. I think that is why his voice is still in my head, keeping me in line, keeping me safe.
My mother suddenly cried out at the dining room table that she was dying. We assured her she was mistaken, but she was right. I was only nine.
Then it was only him, critical and defensive, with the nurturance of tumbleweed.
Focus on trees. You want to write about trees. You love thinking about full grown, thick trunked trees, deep root systems that connect to other root systems, to think of quiet, stable, sentient life, watching and aware. Watching and moving with the breeze.
I used to fantasize about a money tree. But this isn’t about trees at all, again it is about that voice that lingers between my ears. My father used to say — What do you think, I have a money tree? I probably outgrew another pair of shoes, or pants, or drank too much milk. I still find it nearly impossible to buy something for myself. His voice in my head — You don’t think I could use a pair of shoes, some new slacks? Money in, money out. You’re only about money out, boy.
I often see owls in the trees when I go for walks — as well as ravens, red tail hawks, mourning doves, and scrub jays. When I moved the Santa Clarita Valley, I was told that this is the high chaparral, but I think someone lied about that. I think it is more desert, not high or low desert, just middle desert, where we organized communities, planted trees, and watered like hell. Some old oaks were spared in the Whole Foods parking lot. Trees — there are so many planted in my community that when I go for my late afternoon walks I can imagine I am in the Pacific Northwest. That is if you haven’t spent a great deal of time in the Pacific Northwest, and if it isn’t one of the 105-degree days, when you know you’re definitively in the desert.
Someone built a treehouse in our apricot tree. I don’t remember who, but it wasn’t my father. They built the platform and attached eight-foot paneling on each side. On one end,they carved out a crude squarish window of sorts, but didn’t have the right tools, so had to punch it out with a hammer and chisel. They laid green corrugated PVC panels on top, and it was done.
I started having fantasies of surviving outside of our home. I could live in the tree house, but I also imagined holes dug out of hillsides, tarps hung over side-yards, with blankets and radio inside — a makeshift home. I needed to imagine living with any form of predictability, without my father’s rage, without the loneliness of being unseen amongst so much noise.
There are owls. I can hear them, usually just before darkness — in the gloaming. We have beautiful sunsets here. Desert sunsets, dust rising in the distance, in the vast skies of orange, yellow, and red. The distant mountains and low hills waiting for the sun, vibrating shades of purple, green and black.
Yes, there are shades of black, black with purple undertones, or orange mashed with midnight. Black that vibrates like raven’s wings. Black that doesn’t recall the little house I grew up in. Black that connects to all the heavens, and can see that house I grew up in all too well. Black, thick black, layers of thick black fog that is the barrier that my body created between its knowing and my mind.
Caw, caw, caw.
I miss my father. He could laugh, and enjoyed laughing with me when we watched television together, or played cribbage. A lot of time has passed and with that a measure of forgiveness and forgetting. An understanding of the disease alcoholism. An acceptance. I miss another chance we might have to get it right, yet know this fantasy is only possible because of how much I have forgotten.
Today, there is nothing in the trees. The trees call out to me. They remember me, remember the time before I fell asleep, and began developing the skill of dissociation. They have had information passed to them from seventy miles to the east — my childhood home, where the apricot, avocado, and plum trees were coaxed to thrive by my mother before she died — and the black turned another shade, another page.
Trees, and what trees remember.
The branch in ourselves which doesn’t forget.
I meditate, close my eyes and imagine myself in the tree. It is a full grown, forty-foot California peppertree. I’m too large, so imagine myself small, yet large enough for the birds to perch on my shoulders, my thighs, to nest in my hair. Do I feel connected to the root system, the breath of the birds, the flowing sap of the trees?
Do birds have breath? — they must. I’ve seen the small puffs of white when they sing in winter.
There is so much in my life that I don’t remember well enough to give shape, so much of the time between my mother’s death and the time I would eventually wake that I do not recall. Sometimes I get close. I catch a thread, but then it is gone, and I am fully awake in the unknowing. It is then I like to walk amongst the trees, to walk with those quiet, wise masters that I love to imagine hold this knowledge for me. Yet, I can tell even now, from the way my stomach clenches in a knot, and my feet cramp in their slippers, that my body knows as well. It is shaking, like trees shift in the wind, it is speaking to me. If only I can get still enough to hear.
