Pineward
By Lori Brack
“Pineward” first appeared in Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction
I was born the day my parents planted two pines, balled roots dropped into two holes just before the labor pains came. I grew up knowing tree words (bark, branch, needle, trunk), as a toddler grows up pointing to parts of her body and naming them elbow, nose, knee. As I grew, so did my lexicon until by the time I was in school I could say from experience cottonwood borer and poplar, leaf vein and sparrow.
Trees litter a life like the long pairs of dropped needles I loved to pick up from the ground and split at their woody connection to feel the joints give. Trees taught me how to look closely and how to separate, how to emerge for a season and then regrow. But it was the Norway pine dictionary I took with me—the tree under which I grew up with its colorful bark and oval cones. Each new tree and its terminology never grows quite as fleshly as the first book of the world from which the pines and I sprang.
Psithurism: sound of wind in branches
The two birthday pines grew tall and straight and I can’t remember a time when needles did not scent shade, when shade was not stickied by sap. I have studied the pictures of me at two or three buttoned tight into winter coat and hood, standing in a back yard bare of tree shadow, and logic tells me that at least for awhile, the pines I thought of as mine must have been shorter than their eventual shaggy height. We lived inside the daily sound of wind-brightening trees, rare out there on the cold and dry Kansas plains, a shushing made of branches and needles bobbing outside the window, enticing me to believe I could see the gale.
Evergreen: an adjective and a metaphor
When I was 5 or 6, my mother washed my long hair every Saturday in the kitchen. I would crawl onto the countertop and lie flat on my back, hang my hair into the sink. Because I was impatient, she distracted me by singing the parts of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” she could remember. Though it made reaching every part of my head more difficult, I would turn to look through the kitchen window and stare up into the pine, wait each week for my favorite line: “a nest of robins in her hair.” Her fingers scrubbed my scalp and then pulled a comb through the tangles while I looked hard for that nest, the one I imagined was there but obscured by long-needled branches, the nest that was simultaneously being composed against my head, the one that meant somehow I was also the tree.
Resin: sticky tree ooze
After years of growth, one of the original pines was cut down to make way for my mother’s dream of a screened porch. The porch gave our prairie home the air of a vacation cabin, shaded as it was by the remaining kitchen-window pine, the only pine on our street of postwar ranch houses and their optimistic fruit trees or spindly maples.
I turn the spyglass of memory and refocus on pines that lengthen and contract in the telling.
My cat, tacky with pitch, slept on my bed and left tree scent behind. One year, the pine gained a redwood bench around its trunk, partly the work of my father who nailed each section in place. When I sat there, my pants came away with sticky spots, needle debris glued to my thighs. As long as that last pine oozed its gummy gold, sifted winter snow, sheltered black-capped chickadees my mother called “snowbirds” and remained, my life was vouchsafed. Even when I roamed far from the center and lived in the desert or the city, I imagined I felt it out there standing strong in January and sending roots deeper in July.
Hardiness: ability to survive temperature changes
As it turns out, Kansas is the only state in the lower 48 that does not have a native pine. I see only two possibilities: the seeming illogic of maps means something to trees that refuse to creep over borders, or this place makes a pine tree shun it. One Kansas horticulturist believes the reason is weather extremes—frigid winters followed by hot, windy summers—that test a pine’s resilience. Pines, it may be said, can adapt to either, but withstanding both is out of the question.
Somehow the pine I thought of as mine thrived even where it should not have been planted. One afternoon I stitched sharp pine needles through cherry tree leaves, tearing dashes into the leathery flesh. My palms itched with stringing, suturing oval leaf to leaf, the pine reminding me it kept control of what can be said of the desire to pierce, to connect, and to splinter.
When my son needed room to grow, I chose a house with a flowering crab outside the bedroom window. The spring we moved in, the tree was covered in white blossoms, faintly sweet, or maybe only my imagination of sweetness. I spent afternoons on a blanket holding and releasing my son’s squirmy or sleepy toddler body, looking up into branches that drew shapes from a Japanese print on the sky. Grass grew right up to the trunk, the crabapple’s branches loose enough to let in light. In fruited summers, a neighbor would drop over to eat the small, sour apples straight off the tree, and a stranger sometimes called to request picking, pausing to apologize for her jelly longing. Each year, inside a smooth hole high up the trunk, hatched starlings’ hungry cries punctuated the afternoons.
My son did not grow up under a pine, but the crabapple tree matured with him until it was storm felled when he was seventeen, a tree that offered its interval, and like my pine-carved parentheses around mothering.
Deciduous: impermanent
My mother didn’t want trees in the front because each evening, barring clouds or blizzard, she would open the dining room curtains onto the west and watch the sunset blaze or fade against the long horizon. Even though I never mimicked her ritual, she taught me to pay attention to the sky. In some of the weeks before her death, I stayed with her, taking on little tasks she gave me while she spent her days drowsing or staring into the middle distance from the couch. She gave me a big job, too, in her last summer—to arrange for the dead pine, its branches dry and needles brown, to be cut down before it attracted fire or fell on the roof.
The day the tree men came, I stood alone on her screened porch and watched them rig up, saw off the lower branches, disassemble the redwood bench. As they readied the chainsaws for the trunk, I invited my mother to come outside to watch. Her response was a gentle roll of her head propped on the couch’s arm. I asked her again as the saws started up their loud growling. She shook her head once more, passing on the undercutting of trunk, the snap and boom of limbs. Alone and by lengths I discovered a patch of sky I had not seen in decades, watched the end of my last birthday tree. Between the men’s trips to their truck, I slipped out and rescued one branch the circumference and length of my arm, three brown pine cones, and one spray of needles.
I keep them still, put away in a box that my son will come upon one day. On the outside of the box in black marker: Pine Tree. I’ve never unfastened the lid.
Komorebi: leaf-filtered sun
He has directions, my son, to put me beneath a tree as I’m dying. He’s to roll a cot under a fall or spring tree and let leaf shadow play over my blankets, let needles fall on my hands, let me look up once more.
Lori Brack’s Kansas roots are currently planted in Lucas, population 400, where Civil War nurse S.P. Dinsmoor built his own concrete and stone Garden of Eden. She is the author of three books: A Case for the Dead Letter Detective (Kelsay, 2021), Museum Made of Breath (Spartan, 2018), and A Fine Place to See the Sky (The Field School, 2010). Her essays and poems have appeared online and in print including North American Review, Cutleaf, Atlas and Alice, Another Chicago Magazine, South Dakota Review, Rogue Agent, Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, and Superstition Review. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, Brack’s writing and teaching can be found at www.loribrack.com.
That's wonderful, Lori.