The guest judge for Writing It Real’s summer/fall 2011 writing contest was Susan Bono, who chose “Eucalyptus And Elm Trees And Fathers, Too” as our third place winner. Susan wrote about the work that it “flowed so naturally. The writer uses the eucalyptus tree that used to be part of her view to trigger a series of associations from her past. What emerges is a surprisingly tender portrait of the narrator’s unaffectionate family. I loved (and wanted to steal) lines like, ‘The trunk and limbs of this giant tree are cut into logs now, neatly stacked against the east wall of the house. They remind me of a pile of bones, gnawed clean, ready to return to the earth.’ I think this writer has all the pieces in place in this essay, but I lost track of the eucalyptus from time to time (other trees do stand in for it at times, such as the elm at her aunt’s). Even referring to the trees in her parents’ garden might help keep the connection going.” Hildegard considered Susan’s words and found ways to successfully tweak her essay before this posting. You may recognize her name. Another of her essays, “Lucy’s Choice,” placed in a previous Writing It Real contest.

Of Eucalyptus And Elm Trees And Fathers, Too
by Hildegard Hingle 

Every time I look outside my kitchen’s bay window I’m struck by what is missing: The tall eucalyptus down the street that my neighbor cut down a few months ago. Its towering crown used to be the first image my eyes focused on in the morning when I sat down at the kitchen table, waiting for my tea pot to whistle.  Then again later in the day, I’d pass by the tree on my walk around the neighborhood, or catch a glimpse of it on my way to the grocery store.  I loved everything about it: Its quiet strength and inviting branches, its wide-open canopy, its slender pale-green leaves that were forever in motion, forever changing. The trunk and limbs of this giant tree are cut into logs now, neatly stacked against the east wall of the house. They remind me of a pile of bones, gnawed clean, ready to return to the earth.

I miss this tree. I want it back more than anything else. The owner told me that one of the tree’s large roots had broken through the floor of her family room, so she had no choice but to take it down; all her previous attempts to control the root system had failed. “Eucalyptus like to be near water,” Sarah told me, “and I have a swimming pool in the backyard. That’s where it was trying to go.”

I’m drawn to trees like oak and elm, eucalyptus and sycamore. I love their commanding height, their open canopies, the way their leaves murmur in the wind, their rugged trunks and limbs. My aunt, who lived in a sleepy little village in Germany about an hour’s drive from where I grew up, had a huge elm tree in her backyard. I spent many hours during summer vacations underneath that tree, stretched out in an old lounge chair, a stack of  books by my side. The tree’s lower branches would enfold me, close around me like a curtain, separating me – if only temporarily – from a world that all too often didn’t make sense. Sometimes my aunt would sit next to me on the rickety wooden bench that circled the tree trunk like a well-worn scarf, and I’d lie down beside her and put my head in her lap.  She would run her cool, long fingers through my hair, untangling knots and smoothing my forehead while telling me stories about the time she worked as a nurse in a military hospital during World War II. “My soldiers always asked me to put my hand on their foreheads, especially when they were burning up with a fever,” she’d say.

Summer vacation wasn’t the only time I found myself at my aunt’s house. When I was two-and-a-half years old, I stayed with her for three months, a stretch of time I have no conscious memory of whatsoever. There are pictures of me barefoot in my aunt’s garden picking red currants and another picture where I’m all dressed up for church in a frilly white skirt and pink blouse, but those photos don’t trigger memories of any kind.  Here is how my aunt describes the afternoon my mother dropped me off at her house: “You didn’t say much when you got here, except that you were hungry. Your mother waited until you fell asleep before she left. When you woke up, she was gone. You went looking for her everywhere.”

My mother later told me that she didn’t want to send me away, but she felt she had no choice. She needed to go back to work, and there was no one to take care of me. “You were too little to understand,” she said, “so there was no point in trying to explain it to you. Maybe it was all a big mistake, but I did what I thought was best.”

Life in general had a tendency to overwhelm my mother. She would cry frequently, often over seemingly trivial matters:  a dirty foot print on her newly washed floor, an unkind word from a neighbor, a Sunday meal that didn’t turn out as well as she’d hoped. She spent endless hours revisiting the past and obsessing over all the things she could have and should have done differently. It became perfectly clear to me early on that I needed to take care of my own problems, big or small, since my mother was utterly consumed with her own unhappiness, her own endless worries.  To add my troubles to her anguish was simply unimaginable. “I don’t think I should have gotten married,” my mother often said to me, “or had children.”

Every Sunday, without exception, my family and I would walk up the hill to the village church and attend mass. My mother readily admitted that without her belief in God, she might easily have given in to hopelessness and despair and taken her own life. “There were times when I didn’t think I could go on,” she told me more than once. The only thing that kept her sane was her unshakable faith that her suffering would eventually earn her a place in heaven.

Sometimes I would slip outside before mass was over and sit underneath the battered oak tree right by the entrance to the cemetery. The centuries old tree had been struck by lightning many times, leaving several gaping holes right in the middle of its massive trunk. For as long as I could remember, one of these hollow spaces contained a statue of the Virgin Mary, placed there to protect the tree from further harm. I was entranced by this life-like figure with its shimmering blue cloak and outstretched arms, lips curved in a gentle smile. Had Mary suddenly opened her mouth and spoken to me, I would not have been surprised.

All those years I walked past my neighbor’s eucalyptus, I felt an overwhelming need to touch it, to run my fingers across its bark, to press my skin against its trunk. There was one giant branch in particular that drew me in irresistibly: it jutted out horizontally, just a few feet above the ground, before taking a sharp upward turn toward the sky. I’d imagine myself nestled in the crook of this branch, listening to the leaves rustle in the breeze, feeling safe and protected. What kept me from actually realizing this fantasy was the fear that Sarah might see me  and ask me why I was in her front yard hugging a tree.

I don’t remember being hugged by my parents when I was growing up. In fact, I never knew it was perfectly normal for a mother or father to express affection in a physical manner. My mother, in addition to her everyday anxieties and fears, was plagued by numerous phobias and compulsions (scrubbing her hands under a running faucet until they were almost raw was but one of them) and didn’t like to be touched, and my father always seemed uncomfortable expressing emotions of any kind. The first time I returned home from boarding school for a weekend visit – I was fourteen years old – my parents and I shook hands. And when I came back from a three-month hitchhiking trip through Europe the summer I graduated from Gymnasium, we again exchanged handshakes. After I married and moved to America, the intervals between my visits became increasingly longer; but even then, each hello and goodbye was accompanied by a handshake, nothing more. It wasn’t until my mother was eighty-five years old – the last time I saw her – that she and I finally hugged. It was an awkward embrace, and I was glad when it was over.

They say most of us are unable to recall events that took place prior to age three, because our brains are still immature, unable to form those crucial connections.  I do have one distinct memory, perfectly clear and sharp, from that time in my life. I’m almost three years old, returning home to my family after spending three months at my aunt’s house. As we walk up to the front door of my home, I see my father emerging from the garden shed.  He is wearing his brown denim pants, a blue flannel shirt and work boots. The sun is shining in his face and he is squinting, his hat pushed back high above his forehead. I rush toward him, watch him go down on his knees, his arms wide open, and I fling myself into those outstretched arms. He smells of earth and sky and freshly cut wood, and I want to stay in his arms forever. The rest of the afternoon I refuse to have anything to do with anyone else, including my mother. “Even during dinner, you sat on his lap,” my aunt later told me. “You simply wouldn’t budge.” I don’t recall any of those partricular details, but I still see his tall shape materializing in the front yard; I feel his arms around me as he lifts me up and holds me close to his chest. It is the only memory I have of my father holding me in his arms.

My father never talked to me about that afternoon or why he had agreed to sending me away in the first place. Two years before he died, he sent me a letter, which I still keep in my closet, together with a photograph of my parents. They are both sitting on the sofa in their living room, looking straight at the camera. They don’t smile, and there is a palpable distance between them. The letter is handwritten, the paper all yellow and crumbly. My father writes about his health problems, asks me how I’m doing. And then, right at the end, almost as an afterthought, he mentions mistakes he made when I was growing up, and how he hoped I would be able to forgive him. But he doesn’t explain, and I’m left wondering.

All that remains where the eucalyptus once stood is a slightly raised mound covered in wood shavings, remnants of the stump that was ground into a fine powder. My father died twenty-five years ago; I imagine not much is left of him either. He was a stern man, an intensely private person, incapable of sharing his visions and dreams and hopes. By the time I was born, he was already fifty-four years old, more like a grandfather than a father, worn down by years of hard physical labor and an unhappy marriage. But this is not how I want to remember him. I choose to think of him as the tall, strong man who picked me up on that sunny afternoon half a century ago and carried me back inside the home I had been away from for so long.