The Birthday Willow
May 16, 2023. I kneel beside a small hole in the earth.
Today is our daughter Maggy’s fortieth birthday and we have given her, according to her wish, a weeping willow to mark the occasion. Since, in a fit of spring madness, I have just planted over forty trees and bushes around our home, I added that I would happily plant this willow.
Gathering my tools, a wheelbarrow of topsoil, my trusty BioTone, and a bag of mulch, I begin what seems a small project. Yet as soon as I sink a shovel into the sod I know this is not like any tree I have planted in my May madness. To plant a sapling like this to mark a daughter’s fortieth birthday is to number one’s own days. This is a tree, as the saying goes, under whose shade I do not expect to sit. Yet on a sun drenched, billowy spring day, that doesn’t feel anything but good and right and full of grace.
That does not spare me, however, from pain. It is the rocks. The first one is big, and I don’t have the tools here that I have at home, the long steel bar that can unseat these things and lever them out of the hole. I manage to dislodge it, but almost immediately my shovel strikes another stone with a sick thud that I know well: the fell sound of something immoveable. I am on my knees, jabbing with my shovel, digging with my fingers, clearing stone by impacted stone. Finally it moves, and I know somehow I can get it, though it will take perhaps an hour or more.
So I am on my knees, sweating now, panting in the sun. Perhaps, I think, these are the pangs of birth that a man can feel. We are planters, and if it takes sweat and digging and battling rocks, that is a birthing we can do.
On my knees, I pause to take off my glasses, pull up my shirt tail and wipe my brow. There it comes to me, how forty years ago today I left the hospital after our first child was born, drove back to our two-flat on Bluff Street and stood alone. I had been witness to a miracle and didn’t know what to do, so I knelt by the bed and prayed. I had not knelt by a bed since I was a child—and I haven’t since. There is no moment like that.
This is a good day to mark. I can hardly believe I am here forty years later to plant this willow. Any one of a million missteps could have prevented it. It is a good day to kneel.
Well worth the labor, David! It’s hard to believe Maggie is forty years old. Time passes, even between the miraculous arrivals of new life.
Well worth the labor—yes, that tree felt like I had to birth it!
David, you will sit under that willow as a shade tree. Lindsay and Blaine planted one a few years ago and it’s huge. Keep the faith! 😜
Ok—if that thing grows fast and I age slow!
I’ve always thought of gardening as sacred, kneeling being its natural posture.
David the story is beautiful and you tell it so well. I’m right there with you. We celebrate Maggy today and give thanks for her.
My ex-wife planted a dogwood to celebrate my first year of sobriety, it was kind of a beautiful thing – and though I no longer live at the house where it was planted, I can drive by and admire it.
I related to you getting on your knees for first time since you were a boy as well..I did that when I finally had nowhere else to turn at 42 and it changed my life.
Happy 40th Maggy!
PS – to your response to Gloria about aging slow, you and Pam have definitely aged slow, can’t believe you have a 40 yr old! Can only hope the same for Kyle!
Yes—I know your story of kneeling. Sometimes that is the only thing we can do.
C’mon David,
I just planted seven 5-6 foot red maple saplings around our Home Owners’ Association grounds and I’m 79 next week but I assuredly like to think that I may be around still ten years from now to enjoy their shade. If not, they will still be a momento to the peace that I always feel when I’m into gardening.
Your comment on the digging bar rang very true – I gave mine away five years ago when Luci and I decided to downsize to a townhouse anticipating little or no future garden work. How happily wrong I was – even minus that digging bar!
Thanks, Clive—you sit in the shade of your red maples and I’ll sit in the shade of my willow. It’s a deal!
Happy Birthday to Maggy! A beautiful day to kneel indeed! I just picked up a lovely book of essays called “The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape” (ed. Katie Holten). Early in the pages is the quote “He who plants a tree / plants a hope” (Lucy Larcom) Sending water and sunshine to the hopes for continued bright days for your family !
When I plant a tree like that it always feels like an act of hope. It’s a looking to the future, and making every effort now to create the kind of environment you wish to see—though it’s nothing you can take for granted. I guess that’s why hope and prayer go together.
David – we planted a weeping cherry as a memorial to my daughter, Kristen. It was her favorite tree. I know I won’t be around to see it at maturity, but hopefully her two kids and her grandchildren will enjoy it for years. Planting any tree is promise to the future.
Good job, David, and great idea Maggy.
Still can’t believe we have lost Kristen—long may that weeping cherry flourish!
I join you in celebrating Maggy’s purposeful life.
Everything you wrote brought happy tears, whether it was your experience or an analogy. Thank you!
Thank you, Ann
This was a beautiful gesture, in every way. While I’m not convinced of your not being around to enjoy its shade, it did remind me of that Wendell Berry poem:
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
That Berry poem—one of my all time favorites. Thanks, Jess
I couldn’t help but think, after looking at your rocks photo, that you had actually “raised” your own ebenezer (although not on purpose). How ironic, they weren’t exactly placed as “stones of help,” and yet the experience reminded you of the help you received to arrive at this day 40 years later.
I’m reminded of Robert Raines, United Church of Christ minister and former director of Kirkridge, who used to tell a wonderful story about an old woman who, as her legacy, planted thousands and thousands of Jonquil bulbs on the land of her hillside home. He called people like that ‘Plotters of The Resurrection’.
Raines also loved to quote Walter Wink, who reportedly once said, “History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being.”
Tomorrow. I’ll plant bulbs tomorrow.
Thanks for the inspiration.
EK+
Our house was built on landfill: mostly rocks, some large. I’ve dug a lot of holes, with that large iron bar leveraging out rocks, always a challenge. A poet once told me poetry is what one does where one gets lost in time, and she said for me, gardening was poetry. I sit every day at a window, fascinated by the wonder of this poetry, which changes every year. Not everything lives, but with experience and experimentation, poetry gets better every year. Sometimes poetry gets me through a bad day.