 Two
new trees are taking root in our yard this summer - a spruce and a flowering
crab. The sturdy steadiness of the one and the beautiful spring floral
display of the other attracted us to them. They are a sadly sweet inheritance
from my father-in-law, Richard Berg, whose death this spring brought words
of sympathy and gifts of living memorials from friends and family.
About a year ago, I was joking with Dad Berg after a late-spring ice storm
that felled tall trees and unplugged electricity for a day or three. We
lost six trees. Luckily, I told Dick, we found two of them on our roof.
He appreciated a good joke … and was generally gracious about the bad ones.
Before the funeral, Ella - Dick’s wife of 53 years - suggested planting
trees in their three sons’ yards in memory of their father. Returning north
from my husband’s southern Minnesota hometown, we found a certificate to
a nursery and advice from my siblings: Perhaps you’d like to plant a tree
as a memorial to Bob’s dad. Ella and my siblings hadn’t talked to each
other, the ideas simply blossomed simultaneously. This natural coming together
of things or people at the right moment I’ve been taught is true “Indian
time,” the time when things should happen. The cultural bent is a tradition
of not panicking at the ticking of a clock.
Time for joy and sadness, for birth and death, for planting
and for harvest. I’m growing partial to Lake Time and Tree Time, languid
pacing that measures seasons and lifetimes instead of hours, minutes, seconds.
People around Lake Superior know of these alternate timepieces, the lake
and the woods. Many travel miles to get here for the simple pleasure of
measuring time by the arc of the sun’s rays on water. Many stay to enjoy
time as seasons that here cannot be ignored.
Quite a few folks I know create another alternate measure
of passage: the garden. My mother did this every summer at our home. Let
me say with no pride, but no shame, that I did not inherit Mom’s incredible
green thumb … nor her musical ear. Both fiddles and fiddlehead ferns elude
my abilities. Still for three summers, I’ve tended the remains of Mom’s
efforts. It has become my “What’s It?” garden. Rather than planting new
things that will only suffer my incompetence, I instead weed out anything
that seems overly aggressive, underly attractive or mistakes my finger
for a pincushion as I’m thinning other plants. Bunnies and Bambies add
their weeding skills.
Some “What’s It” survivors may be weeds, some legitimate
flowers; all are a gift. This garden is not a memorial to Mom - she is
alive, though living in her mind in a not too distant past when I was a
child and more relatives occupied this world - but it is a memorial to
Mom’s fading “present tense.” Flowers, after all, exist only in this season,
however long that is for them. They spring from the roots of their ancestors,
the first seeds, and from their longer-lived stems … as our lives stem
from our distant ancestors.
So, as I was saying, this summer we planted two new trees, and we look
forward to a time when their rustling leaves laugh with fond memories instead
of echoing through the empty holes made so recently in our hearts.
Konnie LeMay
Editor
|
