At almost the same moment, Samar and the boy who lived in the green house, Stephen, stepped onto their porches. Both had backpacks. Both looked eager to greet the day.
Their eyes met. Stephen nodded—just a flicker—and Samar nodded back. Not a hello, exactly. Just an acknowledgment.
Stephen ran off toward the elementary school down the street, but Samar hesitated. “Hello,” she called softly.
Right on cue, Bongo replied “Hello,” as she did every morning, sounding just like Samar.
Bongo can also do a passable tuba, an impressive Chihuahua, and a fine police siren.
Samar looked up at Bongo, grinned, and headed toward school.
With that, Bongo let loose a hoarse and gleeful caw, and set off to wait for children to arrive at school. She was a regular there. Everybody knew her. She enjoyed annoying the children, and they enjoyed letting her annoy them.
Bongo especially liked to untie shoelaces. While the children were busy retying them, she would snatch treats from their lunch bags.
Every now and then, she would even make a polite request. She could say “Chip, please,” “No way,” and “You rock,” when it served her purposes.
Watching Bongo soar, I considered, not for the first time, my rambling roots. What would it be like to fly? To burrow? To swim? To gallop?
Delightful, no doubt. Sheer joy. And yet. I wouldn’t trade a single rootlet for any of it.
It is a great gift indeed to love who you are.
12
By this time, the lanky boy had walked past me, swiveled, and returned. Glancing over his shoulder, he stepped onto the brown lawn that blanketed my roots.
The air changed, quivering the way it will when people are near, with chemicals, with pulsing heat, with human-ness.
And then it happened.
He dug into my trunk with the object in his hand.
Fast. Deliberate.
Again he checked his surroundings. An elderly woman crossing the street smiled at him and shook her head. She was probably thinking, “How sweet. I’ll bet he’s carving a heart with initials in it. Oh, to be young and in love!”
People are under the impression that trees don’t mind being carved into, especially if hearts are involved.
For the record: We mind.
I’d never seen the boy before. He was big, maybe a high schooler. It’s hard to know with people. With a tree, I can sense to the month, sometimes to the day, its age.
I couldn’t tell what he was carving, of course. But I could tell from the determined way he moved that it was meant to hurt.
Not me. Somehow I sensed it wasn’t meant to hurt me. I was just his canvas.
That said, it’s not exactly a picnic, getting hacked into. Bark is my skin, my protection from the world. Any wound makes it harder to fight off disease and insects.
I wanted to yell “Stop!” To say something. Anything.
But of course I didn’t. It’s not our way.
Trees are meant to listen, to observe, to endure.
He was done quickly. He stood back, admired his work, gave a little nod, and left. As he walked away, I saw the tool clutched in his fist.
A little screwdriver with a yellow handle.
Thin as a twig, bright as a meadowlark.
13
Bongo was the first to see what had happened to me.
She landed at the base of my trunk, head cocked. Dropping the potato chip in her beak, she cried, “I leave you alone for a few minutes, and look what happens! What on earth?”
“It seems someone mistook me for a pumpkin,” I said. When she didn’t smile, I added, “Because, you know, I was carved.”
“For the millionth time, Red, explaining doesn’t make things any funnier.”
Bongo flew to my lowest scaffold branch—one of my big, primary limbs. She examined my injury. “Does it hurt?”
“Not the way an injury might hurt you. Trees are different that way.”
“I gotta do something,” Bongo said.
“There’s nothing to be done.”
“You’ve got a major boo-boo. I want to help. You’re the Wise Old Tree. Tell me what to do.”
“Really, Bongo. Time heals all wounds.”
Bongo hates it when I philosophize. She rolled her eyes. (At least I think she did. It’s hard to tell with crows. Their eyes are like morning blackberries, dark and dewy.) “I just hope my bark isn’t ruined,” I said. “That’s my favorite side.”
“It’s not ruined. Just decorated. Like those tattoos people get.” Bongo nudged me with her beak. “Show me who did this. I’ll get him. I’ll squawk at his window in the middle of the night. I’ll dive-bomb him and yank out some hair.” She flapped her wings. “No! Better yet! I’ll make a deposit on his head. I’ll make a deposit on his head every day for a year!”
I didn’t ask what kind of deposit. I was quite sure I knew.
“Bongo, dear,” I said, “that won’t be necessary.”
Bongo shifted from foot to foot, something she did when she was working out a problem. “You know,” she said, “it’s almost time for Wishing Day. Maybe this is some kind of wish. Just a poorly delivered one.”
“Another Wishing Day,” I repeated. It seemed like we’d just had one. Had a whole year already come and gone? Days have a way of slipping past like raindrops in a river.
“One more round,” Bongo said, “of greedy people bugging you with their needs.”
“One more round of hopeful people wishing for better things,” I corrected.
Wishing Day was always a bit hard on me, and on my residents. Usually the animals and birds stayed away that day to avoid curious hands and endless photographs.
But it was just one day. I understood its history and my role in it. I knew people were full of longings.
A mother tugging a toddler along the sidewalk froze in place when she saw my trunk.
“Mommy, what does that say?” asked her little girl, who was clutching a stuffed toy dog by its bedraggled tail.
The mother didn’t answer.
“Mommy?”
They crossed the lawn. The mother stepped close to me. “It says ‘LEAVE,’” she finally said.
“Like trees have leaves?”
Gently, the mother traced my cuts with her index finger. “Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe like that.”
She looked over at the two houses near me. Shaking her head, she tightened her grip on the little girl’s hand. “Let’s hope that’s all it means.”
14
Those houses. My houses.
One painted blue. One painted green.
One with a black door. One with a brown door.
One with a yellow mailbox. One with a red mailbox.
For well over a century, I’d stared at them. Prim and proper. Same small size, same boxy shape, same pitched roofs and squat brick chimneys. Architectural siblings.
Long before they were a glimmer in some builder’s eye, I was here, right in the middle of things. If my roots stretched past the property line that separated them, well, that’s never been my concern. Roots can be unruly. Mine explored the earth below both houses, pirouetted around their plumbing, anchored their foundations.
I spread my shade fairly. I dropped my leaves evenly. I bombed their roofs with acorns in equal number.