Tree Rings
The world's worst guided meditation
Early in Elizabeth’s pregnancy, she had trouble sleeping. My solution was to do live guided meditations, when I’d try to describe in detail what I could remember of walks we’ve done in parks upstate. Last week I couldn’t sleep, and I decided to write down what I could remember of a different green space.
There were only maybe two weeks a year when you could weave past what little car path existed across the road and down into the woods around the creek. We owned the land, so we could have theoretically gone any time we wanted to, but we took advantage of the days in early spring when it was warm enough to play in the creek, building dams and tossing rocks, before the poison ivy and thorns grew in and made it hard to get through.
When I was very young, the barn still stood in the woods across the road and it would occasionally get attention. We’d have to call the cops to tell them that someone had pulled into the grassy drive and was likely exploring our barn. Eventually, we had the volunteer fire department do a controlled burn on the barn. After that, you couldn’t see the cinder block foundation from the road, and people stopped exploring.
The whole city is hills, the only history book about the town is called “The City Of Hills and Kilns.” Our property stretched a few acres, from the top of some local apex all the way to the creek at the bottom of a little valley. We weren’t positive of the property lines because the creek moved, the water is a living thing. But, when we climbed over the big troughs from the long gone cows and the cinder blocks from the only recently gone barn, you could get down to the water. I remember falling into a swollen pond with my first cell phone, I fried it in the water. But in the early summers before I had cell phones, I’d scramble across the shale on the other side of the creek and make it to Teaberry Rock.
I didn’t name Teaberry Rock, my Dad did, at least I think he did. He had also grown up playing in these woods and I suppose now that maybe one of his older brothers named the rock. Teaberry was a gum brand my parents chewed when they were young. At some point in the early days of online shopping, they bought a big pack of it from an online retro candy store. My Mom joked that teaberry was what you chewed to hide the smoke or drink on your breath from your parents. My parents were pack-a-day-smokers back then, but I don’t remember the smell of teaberry gum.
Teaberry Rock wasn’t a single stone, but a collection of stacked slabs left behind by the glaciers as they shaped what would one day become the now-former Palmer estate. To this day, you can get my Dad going about those glaciers with vivid descriptions as if they were still crawling over the land in the late 1970s. But, they weren’t there, just Teaberry Rock. The fun thing about it to me was that those rocks were all much larger than “the big rock” over in Thompson Park. People who thought they knew big rocks didn’t know shit if their only experience was with the big rock. They hadn’t seen Teaberry Rock.
Of course, I probably only saw it three or four times as a kid, because a few of the times I went into the woods across the street, I got in trouble for it. It was for good reason, given the barbed wire from the cows and the barbed branches of the thorns that would grow in full by late spring. When I ruined my first phone in the creek that one time, it was even more justified.
More of my childhood was spent in the back yard. The property was mostly on a 45 degree angle, only manually landscaped flat for the chip-and-seal road called Christian Place that separated the wooded property from what my Dad mowed, then by the house another 100 yards off the road, and then by the pole building and half basketball court another 200 yards behind the house. I say behind, but given the incline, the house was above the road, and the pole building was above the house. The driveway was yellow fire brick, bricks my grandfather had gotten for free. Piles of extra yellow firebrick were stacked behind the garage that was detached from the house. The original garage before the detached garage was part of our orange brick ranch house, and you could tell in the long living room where the wall had been that had separated the original living room from the garage. The floor creaked where the ghost of the old garage began.
Behind that pile of bricks above the garage, our dog had been on a runner, which was a chain on a long cable that ran from the massive oak that always dropped its leaves a month after every other tree each fall, up to some other bunch of trees higher up in the yard. I remember once Shaylee (I don’t know exactly how we spelled her name) had puppies and for probably just under a year we had 4 dogs chained in the yard. Shaylee was broken by then and didn’t use all of the space available to her in the runner, but it would have been a long oblong shape if she had. She had room to roam. Unfortunately for them as poor outdoor animals and for the state of our yard, the other dogs wore perfect 20 foot radius circles out of the grass.
I remember those circles turning into muddy messes, but I loved the rain that brought the mud. I can remember watching the rain out the screen in the window in the bedroom I shared with my brother. In the summer you could see the giant locust tree with the dead busted branch that never fell off, year after year, because a locust is such a strong tree even when half-dead and coiled with poison oak vines. But, you could get up to that window and look at the tree and smell the hot summer rain. That smell was something so thick and comfortable and accompanied by the thunder in a way that it commanded attention.
Luckily, some animal group was able to find homes for the puppies. The biggest dog was a mostly black scaredy cat, with the strong internally rotated front legs that so many big dogs have. His name was Wrangler, and he and I held the duopoly on denim western wear.
Those mud circles eventually refilled with grass, restoring the big empty space between the dogwood tree that I spent so much of my childhood in1 and the basketball court higher in the yard. Before the puppies and the basketball court though, the yard had these big pine trees. I barely remember the trees, because I was too young and because they mostly served to form the top-most perimeter of my yard. But then one day my Grandfather came and helped my Dad cut down all the pines and the perimeter of the yard expanded, doubling the space back to a line of walnut trees. The fallen walnuts would turn the ground black and damage mower blades.
I do remember playing between the fallen pines and the burning of the brush heap. We had just gotten Shaylee then and she was still sleeping as a puppy in the basement, and in her fearlessness she ran into the bonfire of those pine branches. She was mostly fine but had burnt some of her soft underbelly.
The bonfire was not too far from the big oak behind the garage. At some point, I took an acorn from that oak tree and planted it in front of the garage. Even protected by a surround of yellow fire brick, the neighbor mowed down the sapling a few times that my Dad got help mowing the lawn. It eventually got tall enough to avoid being weed-whacked, and when I drive by the house on visits, I see “my” tree at over thirty feet tall.
After the pine trees were gone, my grandfather took a summer to remove all of the rusted farm equipment from the pole building. I wanted to build a robot with the scrap metal, but instead it was hauled away and we poured blacktop under half the pole building and then again into a half basketball court near the building. I only played basketball three seasons of elementary school, but we’d stand on the basketball court in the summer and launch water balloons down over the house. We put in a used above ground pool. My Dad engineered the deck around the pool, which was level with the grass on the top side and level with the top of the 4 foot deep pool on the other side. There were a few summers when we’d come home to my uncle’s ex-wife floating in our pool. Those summers there were lots of other little kids around, and we’d go to the creek, or catch toads in the gaps in the driveway, or swim until exhaustion. Then the lightning would flash and we’d head under the cover of the pole building and inhale the smell of that hot summer rain.
My parents moved out of that house when I was in college, coincidentally out of the house my Dad grew up and into the house my Mom grew up in. But, when I think of my childhood, I think of the trees in the back yard, of Teaberry rock, and the smell of rain. The rain in Manhattan doesn’t smell like that, and the rain in the city of hills and kilns doesn’t smell like that to me anymore, either.
If I get more tattoos, the next one will be tangle of dogwood flowers, Bodhi leaves, and palm branches across my forearm.