My Oak Tree

Beneath its massive parent, nestled in the moist spring earth, I found an acorn split by its own root. Fascinated by this new life, I brought it home. I was six or seven. My dad said if we planted it, it would become a great tree. I looked up at him and smiled.

He planted the acorn in soil from our garden in a Velvet tobacco can and set the can on the window sill beside his patriarchal throne in the living room. Through the summer it grew to be about four inches tall. As I played with my little sister on the living room floor, sometimes I would glance up at it. Once a day he would lift me up so that I could water our tree.

Beside our house was an old foundation where another house had once stood. Dad had turned it into a kind of rock garden, framed by roses, lilacs, day lillies and a mountain ash tree. We planted my oak tree in a place where it would have some room to grow, away from the other trees. It seemed so small. Just a twig with a couple of leaves. In the fall, when the leaves fell off, it looked like a little dead twig, and I feared it would never come back to life.

But in the spring it sprouted new leaves and new growth. Soon it had four leaves and stood six inches tall. I was proud, and I was careful when I played, that I should not trample it. Years went by, and it only grew and inch or so each year. I thought I would be an old man before it began to look like a real tree.

In a way, the tree and I watched each other grow. As I finished grade school and progressed into high school and grew taller, the oak tree had a couple of growth spurts as well, shooting up a foot or more.

As I progressed through high school the oak tree had grown taller than me. Its branches spread, casting bits of shade on the grass like a grown tree. Its trunk was almost too thick for me to get my hand around it. As a grew into a young man I noticed that the oak tree flowered and produced its first acorn.

It seemed that we were enjoying parallel life experiences as we both grew taller and stronger. The turning of its leaves in autumn marked another year of school. In winter, its slender limbs bore a load of snow. Spring brought new, young leaves to its branches, green with renewed life.

I graduated from high school and went off to college two hundred miles away to pursue a musical career. In my freshman year at college, my father passed away. After his death I spent one last summer at home, at the end of which I said goodbye to my mother, my childhood home and the tree I had planted with my dad.

After three years of college I dropped out of college to go to live in Boston, Massachusetts. Before I left, I came home to visit my mom.

Mom had mentioned that my older sister's husband had built her a garage where the old foundation - dad's rock garden - used to be, next to our house. When I arrived, I saw that the garage was bigger than I imagined it would be. I went inside the house and said hello to Mom. Then I put down my bag and went out the back door to see the back of the garage where my oak tree had been. Mom followed.

"We tried to save it," said Mom, waiting for my reaction.

I smiled. "With winters like you have up here, you need a garage," I said. And I gave her a hug.

She pointed out the other oak trees that Dad and I had planted, but of course it wasn't the same as that first one. But perhaps when I am gone, someone will read this and imagine our oak tree. Perhaps they will be inspired to grow an oak tree from an acorn as did my Dad and I. Perhaps the memory of the tree will live in their minds as it has in mine, all my life.