When I was young, and we moved to a house from an apartment, the backyard contained a willow tree whose giant trunk was the size of a dining-room table. From its base, big enough to carve a coffin, my dad was sure, there stretched nine limbs, each one a respectable tree in itself, stretching up at all angles, like octopus arms. House-owners before us, hoping to keep together two limbs they feared might split and crack the base, had drilled into the trunks thick metal rods with a fastener to hold them in place. We used it like a ladder rung to get to a v-shaped seat that was level with the kitchen window. When I was in my teens, I’d sit in the v, reading Little Women, enamoured with the scene in my head: “girl reading in tree.” It wasn’t that comfortable, but my romantic idea was stronger than the discomfort. Besides, I towered over my siblings.
A few years ago, my sister and I who were in Saskatoon for a funeral, stopped by the childhood home our mother had sold, to spy on what we recognized and what had changed. The house was still the same colour, but security features had been added. And then we noticed that no willow-tree branches cascaded down, higher than the house, behind the roof. So we walked down the back alley and found, behind the garage, where we used to hide, a stack of willow branches, piled like enough firewood to last an entire winter. We felt a twinge of regret that we hadn’t been there to witness our friend being taken down. But the tree wasn’t ours, and in a way, it never had been. It had just held for awhile, our romantic ideas. Just like the house had held us awhile, indifferent to our story. No one carved a coffin out of the trunk to carry our dad who died twelve blocks away. And that idea was gone, first with my dad, now with the tree.
I recently read Jenny Odell’s book How To Do Nothing, and felt inspired by an argument she made for bioregionalism. She writes “similar to many indigenous cultures’ relationships to land, bioregionalism is first and foremost based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors. More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem.” So I took pictures of the trees in winter along the fifty-minute loop I walk, cataloging the clues they reveal in their denuded state. I borrowed books about trees at the library. Associating names to my amateurish observations felt as satisfying as a puzzle. The tree that dangles its seeds attractively like a woman’s pair of chandelier earrings is a linden. The pointy-tipped seed clusters in ombréed brown to blond hues cling to an ash. The double-sided leaves that refuse to drop all winter play an identification trick on me, and Lois Hole’s book taught me to call the silver poplar’s bluff: the “three-lobed leaves are dark green on top, bright silvery white underneath and shimmer in the wind [are] often mistaken for a maple because of the shape of [their] leaves.” Knowledge feels exciting, but it is only temporarily so… I soon leave my camera at home. I read a book of essays about trees by Ariel Gordon and feel silly for having pretended to know something about trees. There are real tree experts in Winnipeg, I realize, and my knowing is only superficial. Twice she writes about naming things: “knowing-the-names has become the way that people signal expertise.” I feel like blushing. Who was I trying to impress by casually working in an observation around the palmful of names I’d gathered? She also wrote: “naming things allows us, as writer and reader, to know that we’re talking about the same things. They’re suitcases that carry not only simple information but also historical allusions and memories…” I like that. Names carrying things, just like trees carrying things, ideas and projections.
I kept trying to make the trees mean something to me, but in the end I’ve had to make peace with my superficial appreciation. I care much more about stories. I’m fascinated by Gordon’s research into the families, some of them Métis, who planted the trees, or the city planner who came up with the idea that Winnipeg should have boulevards planted with elm. I feel awe for the giants spotted in Bois-des-Esprits, and on Pollock Island because they’re big, the biggest I’ve seen here in Manitoba.
All trees point skyward. They grow and thicken while we muck about. There’s a pandemic now. We’re lucky enough to be able to still go outside and take walks. There are more people on the trails now, forced to take up this wholesome pursuit. The kids and I forgo the exercise video links in favour of a daily walk. They follow me like ducklings and move over obediently when physical distance is needed for passers-by. I’ve decided to put off the tree-identification activity I’d planned for them as an educational bonus, just to bask in their health-giving presence. My daughter finds that one willow-tree in particular, with its wild limbs splayed everywhere, looks creepy. My son climbs a thick-trunked one and makes a game of tearing off dead shoots from a cluster. Our appreciation is superficial, sure, but somehow they feel like conduits nurturing a deeper wellbeing. And even though I feel like I don’t care about trees enough, I am grateful to the people who expose a little of their beauty and importance.
