Oh Hops... your explanation about attachment to the trees moved me, very much. I know this feeling well and I can't stop the tears... I don't even want to.
During that awful black hole time while I was being shunned... (for being my self and not what my mom told me to be)
I comforted myself finally, by remembering the room I slept in at Grandma's when I was 4-5-6... I already had anxiety about sleeping, 'coz that's when my parents fights were the worst...Grandma would rub my back and tell me to watch the shadows of the pine tree branches in the streetlight glow on the wall... she told me these were the fairies dancing because the night was the safest time, the happiest time for them, in the moonlight...and I would fall into restful sleep; sleep the whole night through.
At this house where I returned to the bedroom of my earliest years, between the house and the awful trailer my mom chose to live in, was an ancient oak. The trunk was so large that even with my long arms I couldn't reach halfway around it; must've been hundreds of years old even then... part of the original virgin forest that once covered Ohio. This tree was magical, like Tolkein's Ents... it was my guardian, my comfort... as long as the tree was there, there was still goodness in the world. I left Ohio in 1980. And every time I returned to visit - I always made a trip to visit the tree. Say: hello, remember me? (I had a real hard time explaining this to people and took a lot of crap for it...) Without that tree or the memory of the pine trees and how simple, good and magical they are - I don't know if I would've survived. It was the only comfort I had.
Last time I visited the tree, I saw that a very large central branch had cracked off and fallen. Maybe lighting; maybe wind... slightly damaged; but still healthy.
When I left hubby #2 in '99, I left behind hundreds of daffodil bulbs that I'd divided and planted over the years on the hillside; hundreds of herbs terraced into the hill, large rhododenrens, and the red spruce that stood guardian to the house I designed and we built. The bulbs came from my grandma's garden years & years before. I returned a year or two later after we split, to retrieve a large oak cupboard that I couldn't take with me, at the time I moved out. And driving the 1/2 mile long, winding, tree-lined drive up the hill to the house, I couldn't stop the tears... I cried the whole time I was there. Not because of the man I left - but because of the pieces of myself that I left there - like some female Johnny Appleseed... the plants, the trees, the bits of cleaning up I'd done the length of this driveway... and I was feeling, seeing my SELF from all those years of work... what I put into the place; the sense of place.
But leaving, the tears dried up. And I realized it was a good thing to leave these little pieces of me - my cultivation, my building, creativity - in different places... because any time I returned, I find another piece of myself... and I was learning that where ever I was in the world, I would always make it "home".
Gotta go now... I'm either going to smoke to stop the tears, or let loose... don't know which yet...
and I don't think I can blubber online.
