My favorite childhood story was “The Giving Tree” by Shel
Silverstein.
The opening line is: “Once there was a tree…. and she loved
a little boy.”
Once there was a tree…. and she
loved a little boy. She sat nearby, waiting for him to know she could hear him,
and heal him.
Years earlier: When they began
building the house, she resigned to the notion that with one swift swing of the
ax she would be gone. One by one, the trees fell. The foundation was poured and
the skeleton of a new home casted a shadow on her branches. For reasons unknown
to her, she remained standing. Everything had been uprooted; every trunk but
her own, even the grass had been smothered and overturned by the vicious wheels
and workings of the raging machinery.
The men with the bowl-shaped hats would lean against her in the shade of
her branches as they ate their lunch. She didn’t like these men. Some would
extinguish their burning cigarettes by pressing them into her side, singeing
and scaring her hardened exterior.
Later, there was a time when she
was bare, her cloak of leaves gone in the brisk bite of winter. As if they
could tell she was vulnerable, they chopped; not at her trunk, but at her
branches. They pruned her into something worthy of standing next to the
structure taking form beside her. As the house came along, she noticed one of
her branches extended right to the opening of a window. She often wondered in
those next few weeks what would become of the room she peered in. What secret
part of these humans’ lives would she be privy to?
When the time came for the family
to see their new home, she watched as they shuffled out of the sedan parked in
the brand new driveway. The father she recognized, he came by every once in
awhile to chat with the mean men and make the tractors roar to life again. He
was a tall man with dark hair and a warm smile. That day, he came with a wife
and a child. The boy was about four then. The boy raced inside to scavenger the
corners of his newest playground and stopped upstairs, staring into the open
space of his room and out his window at a tree.
The boy would often involve her in
the games he created in the recesses of his bedroom. Sometimes she was the
plank the pirates walked, others she transformed into the robber lurking in the
alley. Whatever she was, the boy always talked to her after their day of
playing games. He assumed she couldn’t hear him, but he talked to his silent
friend outside the window anyway.
His mother got sick not long after
they moved in and, again, the boy would confide in the tree about why his
father always looked so worried and why his mother never ran around with him in
the yard like she always had. The boy would sometimes tell the tree he wished
he could be like her. He wanted to stand strong and tall and not have to watch
who he loved suffer. The boy didn’t know all the things she loved were already
gone, hacked away to make room for him. She wouldn’t dare tell him that even if
she could speak because the truth was: there was one thing left in her life she
did love, and she had to watch him suffer every day as he grew up and life got
harder. The boy’s mother lived for a few more months. In those last months they
would wheel her outside to sit under the shade of the tree’s branches and
breathe fresh air while she watched the boy play. One day, the mother put her
hand on the tree, slowly circling the marks left by the men in the hats. Her
touch was warm and the tree felt the sting of her scars fade a little. The next
day the father wheeled the mother out to sit under her branches. That day,
though, he brought with him boxes full of old bottles the mother had collected
over the years. She instructed the boy as he climbed up into the tree and hung
the bottles, one by one, from her branches. The boy’s touch was even warmer
than that of his mother’s as he moved about the branches. The tree had grown to
love this woman too, not as much as boy she watched over, but she loved her
still.
When the mother died, she was
buried under the tree where she sat to watch the boy play; under her treasures
that still hung from the branches. The tree held on to the mother’s memory that
hung from the branches and enriched her roots, hoping she could give it to the
boy when he needed it.
That night, the father tucked the
boy into bed and left him to sleep as he closed the door behind him. From the
glow of the nightlight, the tree watched the boy’s lips as he whispered in his
bed. She watched as he blew a soft, sweet kiss through the ceiling and towards
the night sky.
The boy awoke differently. A light had gone
out of his eyes with the passing of his mother and she yearned to put it back. She
knew there had to be a way to give to him what was left of his mother.
As night fell the boy sat against
the open window and peered outside. Down, he looked to the dirt of his mother’s
fresh grave still covered with fresh cut flowers of her favorite color. Up, he
looked to the sky, which somehow still held so much left for the boy to
discover. Lastly, he looked at the tree, which held the remembrance of his
mother. He slowly climbed out the window and onto the branch sitting inches
away. He moved to the trunk of the tree where he settled in for the night. He
listened to his mother as the wind moved the contents of the tree and sang him
to sleep.
