Home Is Wherever a Glimpse of a Tree Is
Me, trees, and memories
Trees. Safety. Peace. Solace.
Four words to convey what a home means to me and in that order.
I often receive puzzled looks when I reject a potential home simply because it lacks a view of a single tree.
“But it’s a metro city, you must be happy to even get a space”.
“Isn’t the comfort you get within the home what comes first?"
No!
I need to see a tree when I open the main door. I persist.
Eight years ago when I stepped into this city and roamed with my parents to choose a paying guest accommodation for ladies, even my mom checked at the entrance desk if a room with a tree view was available (love you mom).
The biggest punishment for me is a life of starting out of a window into a wall. I mean, what’s sadder than that?
Also, if I reach my hands out of the window, I should be able to touch a leaf at least. I have never minded strange glances from the hostel rooms’ other occupants when I sit by the bed and try to reach the leaves.
I touch the leaves and give them a happy approval. Yes, I’ll take this room.
I will forever cherish my first hostel room that was painted in a salmon pink, with two tiny beds and a wide window with a view of two trees that bore yellow flowers.
There I was about to meet my roommate, who would introduce me to the world of loving dogs.
The yellow flowers in this new city were a connection to my home. There is a huge tree by our window at home, and mom calls it the yellow shower flowers tree.
Every summer, my mom reminds me it’s time to come home with just one sentence:
“The yellow showers are in full bloom”.
Decades later, today the sound of the chery blossoms trees whooshing to the monsoon serenades me as I am writing this article.
The sweet nothing is what fills a home. A cup of tea by the couch and watching the trees, the passersby.
Watching the rain and winds make the tree sway violently, and feeling a little fear when the leaves hit my mist-tinted window is what the monsoon means to me.
I sit with my book by the window and watch my pup trying to catch the insects from the leaves on the windowsill or smell the green background with her little nose.
In summer, dry leaves drift towards my kitchen window as I prepare my apple cinnamon tea. My kitchen even boasts views of two trees.
My very early memories of fear was four monkeys sitting on a coconut tree outside our home.
I hid under my bed fearing they will attack me.
Five years later when we moved to a different city, watching rows of gulmohar trees in the night and gently woken up from my mother’s lap meant we were home.
There are many arches the trees form and that one arch meant we were home.
I burst into tears when the gulmohar tree, whose roots reached into my garden, was cut down by the neighbors, who then poured acid over it to ensure it would never grow again.
Today I avoid roads where a row of trees were destroyed for the metro rail construction or just because someone in power has an idea for development.
In my late twenties when my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia I would be awake all night hugging her into sleep.
I recall the times when I would see the golden shower tree, with tears flowing from my eyes, and ask what we did to deserve this.
I will never have the answer, except for their calming presence.
It was the same home, but I was tormented by fear and suffered while watching her suffer.
That changed the entire meaning of what home meant to me. It was just a structure in bricks and cement that keeps me safe from the world but is still a place where the trauma and suffering of a small family will choose to continue.
I desired something permanent and reassuring to hold on to. That’s why perhaps I chose trees..
Trees are the life breathers into any space I choose to occupy with my kind of people
I remember the first glimpse of sunshine hitting the face of me and my sleeping lover sometime in August years ago.
I remember smiling at the sleeping face of my lover almost crushing me with his tight embrace.
The man I loved more than anything, the beautiful cherry blossoms entering my window, sunrays sliding down his beautiful eyelashes, it was surreal. We could have been in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.
My heart was in full bloom like those pink flowers.
I have a habit of silently talking to trees when I enter a new region or pass by them.
I ask them questions, express my wishes, and somehow they always come true.
If not, I gain a kind of clarity that I can’t find anywhere else.
They are my friends anywhere in the world as long as I am breathing.
Final Thoughts
The story of this nondescript person’s life is deeply connected to the trees.
My life, my breath I take in a place I call home, has no meaning without the trees.
People say the moon holds the secrets of millions of years of history.
But these trees that live with us and breathe the same air as us, take the brunt of our greed and can tell much better stories of humanity.
