Family Tree

John has always looked out the same window overlooking the same yard – a yard of his ancestors’. This land has been the home of his family for many generations now and although he has always known it, he only really thinks about it upon occasion.

The grass that grows here has not been replanted; it is the same grass that grew under the feet of his grandfather and those of his mother. He has thought about this, about the fact that they all learned to walk on the same soft landing of green. However, the grass still just looks like grass as far as John is concerned. It could be anywhere. It has crossed his mind that the soil has grown vegetables to nourish his great-grandmother, just as it does the same to nourish him, but this isn’t brought to the forefront of his mind every time he looks at the ground.

There are select relics of the times before him that force his attention to his familial connection to this place. The small row of wooden crosses for the generations of beloved pets that are buried in the far corner of the yard is one such relic. As the row continues to the right, the crosses look less weathered. The last few crosses, added within John’s own lifetime, remind him that he is a segment in this timeline. The crosses started long before him, and they will continue long after him. There are also the things that have no mark of him upon them, but they have the mark of his family. The old root cellar often goes unnoticed, but when he really sees it, he is transported back in time to about a hundred years earlier when it was still in use.

Oddly enough, the fixture in the yard that brings his family history to mind immediately when his eyes hit it, more than any other, is a pear tree standing in the backyard. This tree is living and growing, and, while it is constantly changing, its bark always tells the same stories. Like the grass and the soil, this tree has been supporting members of his family for many years. John remembers numerous days in his youth spent sitting on the front porch with his grandfather listening to stories about this tree.

John’s grandfather shared his memory of when the tree was planted, back when he was a young child. His grandfather (John’s great-great-grandfather) planted this pear tree as a gift for his wife (John’s great-great-grandmother) for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. The tree was planted as a symbol of their love and, much like their love, it continued to grow with them for the rest of their lives and beyond. John’s grandfather told of this pear tree acting as a place of comfort for his mother (John’s great-grandmother) after the loss of her son. According to John’s grandfather, his younger brother was only two months old when he passed away.

This pear tree, John was told, lost a limb in a particularly harsh storm. John’s grandfather used some of the wood from that limb to make his and his wife’s wedding rings. To this day, John’s grandmother wears a piece of that tree on her finger. On this tree, John has found the initials of his mother and father carved inside of a heart, roughly cut deep into the bark.

Every year, when he’s harvesting the fruit from that small old tree, John is really harvesting the memories of those who came before him. He cannot look at this tree and not think of the many roles it has played over the years. On each branch, he sees connections to his family – to himself. The shortest branch is the one from which he picked his first pear. He can still remember how excited he was when his grandfather lifted him up and encouraged him to reach out and grab one of the speckled golden-green objects. Pure happiness is a toddler biting into a juicy fresh-picked sun-warmed pear. Nothing is to be found on that face, but joy and pear juice. On every branch of that tree is the memory of a family member.