sebenikela

Beau Taplin || T e m p l e s (via cosmofilius)

My parents’ front yard had a huge Elm tree in it–stretching up past my bedroom window, above the house, into the sky, a resilient survivor of Dutch Elm disease and everything else nature could throw at it.

But last year it had to come down: it was hollow, unstable, sick, and if it fell in a storm it would crush the house.

My mom says it felt like an earthquake when the huge branches dropped.

My mom’s a gardener. She’d taken the grass out of that yard and put in beautiful things, a Japanese maple, a blue and pink hydrangea in memory of my grandma, trillium she rescued from construction sites and uncountable things I can’t name.

The garden was crushed by those huge falling limbs. She walked out when the last of the tree had been hauled away, and she mourned for the broken Japanese maple and the hydrangea she couldn’t find trace of and the mud and mess of this place she birthed and nurtured and loved.

But.

But the thing about all of these plants is they come from forests, and in forests, trees fall.

So in the spring, things changed:

The Japanese maple is gone, but there’s a few tiny seedlings trying to be born.

The hydrangea is sending up new branches from its broken stem.

The trillium bloomed, the ferns uncurled, the dogwood, damaged but unbroken, thrived in the sunlight.

And from the roots of that elm tree sprouted a whole flock of saplings.

So many that Mom’s had to cut them back. So many that for years she’ll have to play tug-of-war with the living roots of that dead tree to keep the front yard from turning into a forest of spindly elms.

She laughed, last week, when she told me about it.

“There’s a story there,” she said, shaking her head on my computer screen. “Something about resurrection.”