A Tree Out Back

There was a massive tree in my back yard. The trunk was a good ten feet around, and the nobby knuckles of its roots filled almost the entire yard. The bark was smooth and white, hard like sinews of muscle and bleached bone, nicked here and there with deep black cuts and dark red notches. And most notable of all, the tree had made a strange twist as it had sprouted, as though tightening its grip on the soil, and the contours of this twist could be followed round and round the trunk and high up into the branches, determining the shape of its whole long tortured growth.

A rumor had spread that there was some sort of special enchantment about this tree, and people came from all around to see it and to reach out hesitating hands to touch its cool surface. In the early days, whole crowds had come to see the tree, coming day and night, and there had been a constant carnival of noise and excitement in the backyard. But over time, the rumors had subsided, and people just came every now and then, alone or in small groups. Touching the tree seemed to calm them, make them think, and they would leave quieted, stepping carefully over the roots in bare feet and treading off lightly across the lawn, taking the quiet away with them as they left.

One day I was having breakfast with my neighbor, and we were watching from the kitchen window as a family came to visit the tree. The shade was deep under the tree, and there was a glow of morning light in the grass beyond the shade. The mother had brought her three sons to the foot of the tree, pulling the smallest one up the driveway in a red wagon. We could see her explaining to them that it was okay to touch the tree and showing them by reaching her hand out and touching the tree herself, but we couldn't hear the words that she was saying.

I took a sip of my coffee and I leaned towards the window and looked up at where the higher branches of the tree got tangled in the sun. I turned to my neighbor and I told her that the real miracle in all of this was that while I knew that the tree was here for everyone's sake, disseminating its peace and its peculiar wisdom on Earth, I also somehow knew that it had grown here only for me, that it was the capstone of my life, the thing that would lull me quietly to sleep in the end. I couldn't reconcile these things, but I felt it, I knew it, every time I looked out the window at the tree, and it was almost more than my heart could take. I asked her if she understood. She shook her head no, but she smiled and reached out her hand.