The yard is a hundred shades of green with punctuation marks of red geraniums, climbing pink hydrangeas, and golden black-eyed-susans. Along the porch edge the yellow marigolds, orange impatiens, and red-orange geraniums smile up between the white petunias and blue lobelias. The clematis vines have climbed to the upstairs porch where they are blooming away in orchid-pink stars.
The layers of green on the hillside are starting to look like I had hoped they would. The hundred-foot white pine that was shaved on one side by an ice storm two decades ago has become a dark backdrop for the dogwoods and redbuds we planted to hide the missing branches. Smokey-gray lichen dot the bark of the pine giving character to the once-ravaged trunk. The beautiful weeping redbud my sister and her husband gave us years ago now looks like a fine lady’s green umbrella of perfect leaves layered like a swan’s down fan. Last spring before leaves, the umbrella was solid pink blossoms.
Beyond the layered pine and dogwood and redbuds is the dark, dark green rounded beauty of the “oak bush”. Yes, I know there is typically no such thing, but a few summers ago our stately oak was diseased and died. We had the tree cutters saw it down, and, like always, I asked them to leave me a tall stump that I could use as a pillar to hold a big planter of geraniums and trailing sweet potato vines.
Much to our surprise, the “dead” oak stump began send out green shoots! We had seen willows do this, but never a hardwood like an oak. We have watched now for several years as our oak stump turned into what we now call our oak “bush”. It is now a 20 feet tall and perfectly shaped tree. We tell our porch guests to look closely, for if they do, they will see the thick stump of our old oak tree, now almost totally camouflaged by thick new branches reaching like children around the stump to grasp hands as they dance in the breeze. I sit here this morning marveling at what God can do with the seeming tragedies of nature.
We, too, have whole parts of us that have been sheared off by the ice storms or cut down entirely, leaving us despairing because we thought that part of our once tender hearts was dead. Sometimes we, too, have tried to hide the gash or the stump with some fast-growing blooms or repurpose what was left and make do. But, lo! Something new was sprouting from a deep root! And look there, how we were surrounded and healed by the flowering beauty of others who came along side to cover our wounds and bloom away while we healed and found a new role. Hope! Insistent hope!
Farther down the hillside from the redeemed pine and the oak bush is another old stump, this one of a huge willow that was toppled by a windstorm. Willows are more brittle, and while they can bend to most spring winds, they are more easily broken by twisters. Again, we had to cut this tree below the break. It stood for many years, sort of rotting away on the inside leaving a jagged circumference. Ants and other insects gradually reduced the core to sawdust. One day, headed to the creek for a cook-out, we noticed a sprout in the middle of the decaying stump. By the end of the summer, we could tell the sprout was a mulberry. This year, nourished and shelter by the old willow wood, the sprout is well on its way to being a strong mulberry tree that will furnish a good crop of food for the dozens of bird species that make our land their home. These are the same cardinals, finches, warblers, wrens, martins and cedar wax wings that sing to us from the old white pine and the oak bush while the sun is setting to the west of our front porch.
Eventually, for all trees and people, there will be an end of our time on this good earth. But the end is not the end. There is an “after that.” The seeds of the willow catkins in the spring and the pinecones and acorns in autumn will take root somewhere for a crop of new sprouts. And even the core of an old tree will prove to be fertile soil for something fresh and green.
