Riff on Opening Lines: "The Giving Tree"

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.