For everything that happened in our red brick house with its white garage, what I remember most are four giant sycamores lining our yard. Daily, I walked home from junior high. Coming up the street, they were the tallest trees of anyone’s on the block. Once, they’d even withstood a tornado that blitzed our scrubby town. All over the neighborhood, trees had been uprooted, structures leveled. Not the sycamores. They towered above the damage, were constant in chaos.
Even when it was over a hundred degrees outside, the sycamores remained cool to the touch. I’d circumambulate their trunks scheming for ways to climb them, but they were too tall; their lowest branches, more than fifteen feet from the ground. So I’d lie in the grass, longing to be in their branches, gazing upward into their thick canopies of filtered yellow and green light.
A few years before, when we’d lived in Kentucky, a giant maple on our corner had a partially hollowed trunk that’d been eaten from the inside out. Because of that, I could easily scamper into its maze of branches, leaves bursting around me like broad stars; my fortress overlooking Washington Avenue. But the maple was on borrowed time, its trunk slowly decomposing. Even so, what it had left to give, it did bountifully. When I think of that maple, what I remember is a place where it was safe to cry; where I’d open like leaves to the light.
When we moved to Oklahoma, there were no treetops in which to hide; just those colossal sycamores reaching higher than I could see. To me, it wasn’t enough that I could scale the elm down the street. Over a couple of its knurls for footholds, it was a seven-foot climb to a fork where its trunk split in two directions. But that divergence was as high as I could get because, from there, each half ascended another eight feet without a single branch. No shield of leaves.
The sycamores took whatever space they wanted, and we lived around them. They were messy, littering the ground with strips of bark. Their brown, outer layers sloughed away, revealing smooth sheets of ash and white. By early summer, thousands of dried seed balls would drop into the yard, onto the sidewalk and driveway. With my sneakers, I’d grind them into the pavement, crushing them into tan powder. Through tufts of grass, I’d push a shiny red lawnmower, seeds exploding in the blades, plumes of them in the air. In multiple places, their roots punched through the sidewalk, and we’d unexpectedly stub our toes. Once, my brother tripped from his skateboard and had to get stitches under his eye. He still has a V-shaped scar.
I had a crush on a girl at church who was already in high school. Into a smooth patch of bark at eye level, with my Swiss Army knife, I carved her initials inside a large heart: a scar for unrequited love and its rescue that never came. Summer after summer, I leaned against its trunk, that engraved heart and its yearning inching above my head until, one day, I realized it wouldn’t matter whether or not I could reach a branch: I was now too afraid to climb. There was too much to lose in falling. But the ground had become much more hazardous without a tree to hold me.
***
Next to my bed was a window. The same one Mamma broke with my head when she slapped me with both hands. Into the blinds, I fell. It sounded exactly like breaking glass, but because my ears were still ringing from impact, I didn’t know if that crack
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