Jesus Trees
I spent my summers a spy in a Jesus Tree in our front yard.
Our front yard was an imperfect square of green, with a telephone pole in one corner near the street, near our neighbor to the left, and a mailbox on a post in the other. Our driveway bordered to the right, our sidewalk underlined most of the rest from the base of our steps. I’m remembering all of this from the front porch, just as I’d step out from the house. The morning sun baked that door, the rarest used of all the house doors. The hinges would creak a little and the wood would sigh. The wooden door pulled inward, the storm door swung out on its piston, and the porch was half a step down. Concrete and covered with a putting green carpet, the porch hosted two concrete planters where my mother installed flowers from Kmart every spring. The purple ones, the white ones, the little red ones with dark green leathery leaves.
The mailbox sat atop a sway-back post of wrought-iron, bent such a way thanks to a rookie local cop. Our house was at a broad turn in the neighborhood circle, giving it the largest plot of property, making our mailbox a target, the unfortunate victim of a distracted policeman new to his patrol. He missed the opportunity to turn and met the post head-on. He was fine, the vehicle drivable, the post suffered most. My Dad could’ve gotten angry, but he let it go, no harm done.
Our front yard hosted two trees and a gangly, determined snowball bush. The trees were small for trees, one next to the telephone pole at a respectable distance, another similarly situated near the mailbox. Both were dogwoods. Dogwoods are Jesus Trees.
A dogwood flowers in the spring, weeks to either side of Easter Sunday. The flowers are white, seemingly four-petalled. Three of the four apparent petals are uniform in size, one is a bit longer, like a cross. Each is tipped in purplish-brown, bruised, stained like drops of blood. At the center of each bloom is a collection of green. This center is the flowering head of the dogwood. Touch it and find it spiky, solid until it blossoms into tinier blooms. Flowers like a cross, petal-like leaves tipped in blood, each one offering a crown of thorns. Why does the dogwood lean to the side? The weight of our Lord. Dogwoods are Jesus Trees.
The dogwood near the telephone pole was shorter, smaller, a compact tree what wanted to be a bush. The dogwood near the mailbox was open, inviting. It pushed its leaves to the outside of its orbit, leaving the interior mostly empty. The limbs within twisted and curved like a ribcage. If you approached from the right angle, stepped in under the lowest boughs, you could stand within the tree. If you were small, you could. I was seven or eight when I made this discovery. I was a little older and a little braver when I found the limbs like a ladder to carry me up and into the center of the tree. One, two, three limbs up and there it was, a perch for a spy. Once discovered, I knew. There I’d spend my summers.
In the shade of the welcome dogwood tree, I’d sit and watch the traffic of our neighborhood. Trucks on the approach, cars shimmering as they rolled into focus. I didn’t have glasses then, but I needed them I’m sure. One or two cars every ten or fifteen minutes. Neighbors and strangers, I made notes in my head about each one. Counting cars by color, then forgetting the color and starting over. Before too long, the mailman would turn the corner up at the head of the neighborhood, coming into view and beginning his step by step advance. Roll and stop, lean out, take and leave. Dropping red flags when he found them. Ever closer, closer still until he was at our mailbox.
I watched him from my natural blind. He took away the paid bills and car notes, left junk mail, magazines, cards, letters. He never raised his face, never caught my eye. I thought I was invisible. He humored my childish assumptions. He rolled on to the neighbors next door. I didn’t move until he was around the next bend. In the quiet after his departure, I could close my eyes and hear the entire neighborhood. Barking dogs, sprinklers, buzzing insects, kids in the summer-abandoned playground, lawnmowers, and a faint summer breeze.
There’s a hymn in the Methodist Hymnal. It’s about Providence and the comforts of faith. It’s about me and my Jesus Tree.
Leaning, leaning,
safe and secure from all alarms;
leaning, leaning,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
For years I sang “on” as “in.” Not just supported, cradled. What a comforting misread. The chorus invites the congregation to lean into the “leaning,” drawing out the “e” sound so much you can’t help but sway a little. Like a tree in the breeze, even a summer breeze that barely moved a branch at all, much less one bearing the weight of a kid. Safe and secure.
The dogwoods are gone now. They caught blight while I was away at college. My Dad had no choice. Besides, he said, the welcoming dogwood had turned sprawling and needed trimming on the regular to keep it out the street, keep it from snarling around the mailbox. It was time.
The front lawn of my parents’ home is still an imperfect square of green. The driveway remains to the right, expanded a few feet to offer some forgiveness pulling in and driving away. The snowball bush fell victim to some minor property line dispute with our neighbors to the left. My Mom planted tulips near the base of the telephone pole for a number of years, but not so much anymore. The spirit is willing, her knees are weak. Now she and my Dad tend shrubs and greenery nearer the house, hedges along the other side of the sidewalk from the grass. It’s taken them years to get the azaleas to cooperate and bloom in unison instead of some one month and the rest weeks later. They were an undisciplined azalea choir, coming in before their measures, missing their cues.
We remember the comforts we gathered as a child and if we’re very lucky we find analogs as adults, acceptable analogs offering a similar safety and security. If not the very object itself, if not the exact experience, we find enough to build a faith around. No longer children, our faith has to grow to fit.
There is a park bench near our apartment, and when the sun is just right, light filters through the leaves overhead and dapples the sidewalk with fluttering shadows. If I stare into the distance, watching the traffic along Central Park West, looking for Yellow Cabs just to know they’re there, I can hear the world. Dogs in the dog park, occasional sirens, workmen on scaffolds, skateboards on uneven sidewalks, kids coming up out of the dark subway station, and a faint summer breeze.
A month and a half ago, I walked along Sixth Avenue past Minetta Park. The rain had only just subsided, the air was cool as we were denied another warm spring afternoon in New York City. For weeks, it felt like summer would never come, like we’d skipped right over into fall. As I took my usual route along the fence line of the park, a splash of white caught my eye and I stopped. Hanging over the fence was a bough of dogwood flowers, heavy and beaded with rain. I took a photo with my phone, because that’s what we do now with moments we want to capture. Electronic amber.
To nobody in particular, or just to the Jesus Tree itself, I said “I didn’t expect you to be here.” In answer, the bough dipped and swayed in a barely noticeable wind.
