3.21.22

This house is surrounded by trees; I've slowly learned their names over the few years I've been here. In the back yard, behind your sculptures and in front of the McDonalds sign, is a pecan tree. Two Aprils ago, the neighbors sent their son over for pecan wood, someone who I've still haven't met but who has been sent over here on errands multiple times. In my mind I imagine him: a scraggly teenage white boy, annoyed with the endless errands, maybe tall or maybe short. Anyways, I remember being intrigued about the task so I asked about it; apparently pecan wood was great for smoking and for barbecues. When ____ left that Spring I would lie in the backyard and look upwards at the pecan tree and wondered why I'd never seen any pecans grow on it. After ____ left, I wrote poem after poem in my notebook, trying to conceal what I meant to say to them. I wanted to say: I love you and I'm sorry. What I said was everything else. That was the Spring I also started running. I would run until I was tired and then turn around and go home. Running taught me forgiveness, I remember thinking. I would run until my ears started ringing and then I would turn around and walk home. Forgive me, forgive me I would say to myself. I do, I do I would reply. Now I run longer distances than I could have ever imagined in the past. I go on and on and I even run all the way back home. Is it possible I have been forgiven? 

The window in my first room in this house framed a cherry tree. I would go on the balcony and reach my hands out in vain for the cherries, hanging in pairs. They were always just out of reach. I woke up once to the sound of the neighbors picking cherries with a contraption made especially for the task. I thought it was so beautiful, watching the entire family pick cherries. I thought of _____ with a long pole, in the backyard of that house from so long ago, shaking the orange tree we all loved in the backyard. I had just woken up and walked into the backyard to them shaking the orange tree. Leaves, flowers, and oranges came tumbling down. I said to them: I didn't know orange was a winter fruit. What I meant to say: I am happy to be here with you. My heart may be a bursting orange. I'm sure now that I am home.
We had made mimosas with those oranges and got day drunk. For some time, our kitchen overflowed with orange juice and love. 

Once, years ago, my father visited me in this first room. He looked at my life, like I did, and was puzzled, like I was. He told me that the windows in the room faced a bad direction; meaning it would be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I felt ashamed for living an ordinary life, exposed to ordinary sensations like hot and cold. Then, I asked him why he left our family very simply over tacos. He replied immediately. He wanted to be free, he said. After he left, I sat in my room with the windows facing the wrong way and wondered which one I wanted more - freedom or forgiveness. And then; who had trapped me; and who had blamed me? 

I am following the words now to the last tree, which every other tree had been leading up to. Outside the windows of my second room, there is a silk floss tree. Let me describe it to you, in case you don't know. It's a tall, slender tree with thorns up and down its sides. The leaves are flat, almost resembling a money tree's. From the silk floss tree grows pods that burst in the Spring with seeds and what looks like cotton. For some time, when I walked out our front door I would see what looked like cotton floating in the wind. I thought it was strange and beautiful but for a time, didn't ask why. 

There isn't that much more to say about this silk floss tree. When I think of it, I don't think of anybody else. There's nobody else I've met under it, in the past or in the future, besides myself.