Trees and Seasons
The trees are full of leaves in this land of evergreens. I like these trees – now heavy with rain, their shine dulled. But not like death; like resting. Like going within to absorb all that nourishing water.
In this small town, the rainforest is ever present – on the surrounding hills, and still in welcome remnants lining our streets.
This is Autumn. Some few trees do lose their leaves. My frangipani which has grown to cover my whole front wall, begins its shedding. It will be beautifully bare for Winter, its curving branches stretching and crossing in a random, leisurely lattice-work.
My childhood trees were willow (introduced) and blue gum (native). The willow I liked best in Spring, making a canopy around me when I sat on the swing my Dad made, hanging from a strong low branch. In Spring that canopy was tenderest green. Soft light shone through, filtered. Hours I dreamed and swung … or simply dreamed, trailing my feet on the ground, seeking the sky through the topmost arc: invisible, private, safe.
The blue gum, in a different corner of the yard, was the tree I climbed. I was timid in some ways, and fearful of heights, but this was a solid, spreading tree, easy to access from the wooden fence underneath. The horizontal support beams were just the right heights to make a cling-and-scramble ladder.
My first big step from fence to tree put me in a wide hollow in the lower branches – a resting-place with a floor, a firm back, and safe walls. I used to tuck a book into my belt as I climbed, then sit up there and read for hours among the air and the leaves. When I heard Mum calling, I didn’t respond.
‘Where were you?’ she'd ask when I finally showed.
‘Just reading,’ I’d say, deliberately vague. My blue gum sanctuary was secret.
Robert Graves told me years later, in The White Goddess, that repeatedly sitting under a willow would make one a poet.
Later still, trained in various forms of energy healing, I was given one 'from Spirit', characterised by colour – the same grey-blue, I eventually recalled, as the leaves of my nurturing gum.
Written for Weekly Scribblings #63: Trees at Poets and Storytellers United
