Ann Patty

Word Count 1162

The first Mother Memorial Red Maple, a twenty-five-foot “Red Sunset” was planted at my father’s behest on the 9th fairway of the Sequoia Country Club in Oakland, California. The kitchen window of my parent’s house overlooked that fairway, an inviting greensward bordered by eucalyptus, sequoias, and live oak. My mother would sit for hours at her kitchen table; playing solitaire, watching the golfers tee off and make their way down the fairway. She herself had golfed that fairway hundreds of times. Golf had become my parents’ main activity in their later years, and my mother had been captain of the women’s golf league two years in a row. That was against the rules, but I believe the other women knew that her role at the club was one of the few remaining tethers holding her against the alcoholic tide that was more and more eroding her. Her serious drinking had begun when, fifteen years before, the Zerbes moved in across the street – next to the fence that marked the border of the golf course. The Zerbes, a childless couple who’d formerly owned a bar in LA and boasted a passing acquaintance with Ronald Reagan, began drinking in the afternoons, and soon my mother joined them.

After my father moved to Alameda and stopped being a member of the club, the red maple died. He was hurt and outraged that the club hadn’t taken the time to water it rigorously after all the years and money they’d spent at that club. It felt like a personal insult to both of them.

The second Mother Memorial Maple was planted at my home in upstate New York. Dad was failing fast, and for the first time since my mother’s death six years before, we all gathered at my house. It was a beautiful September weekend, the only thing Dad wanted to accomplish was to plant a red maple in honor of Mom. All of us: four kids, three spouses, two grandchildren, dug, watered and planted a ten foot “Autumn Glory” next to a dramatic lichen-covered rock outcropping at the edge of my front lawn. After tamping the earth firmly around it, my father, frail and barely able to speak said, “Let's all remember Mommy.”

The Autumn Glory expired a year later, the same year my father did, a victim of my lawn man’s overzealous weed-whacking which lashed away the lower surface of the bark..

I planted the third Mother Memorial Maple, the “King Crimson” a very sturdy sounding tree, the year after Dad died; it had seemed so important to him that Mom have a tree at my house. And, of course, this tree was also for Dad. It thrived for ten years, until I had to move it to make space for an addition I was building onto my old house. Moving it was a major production, involving a back hoe, two strong men, and much compost and mulch.

The tree looked smaller, centered at the edge of the deep forest, but I could imagine it fifty years from now, a surprising blaze at the border of the woods.

The next morning when I went to inspect the new planting, I was dismayed to see a good three feet of bark missing on one side of its trunk, and began cursing the back-hoe man. But as I inspected the trunk more closely, my contractor pointed out that there were striations all over the bark-- long, vulvuler scars where the living wood broke through the bark. How had I not seen them before? All my imaginings were focused on its form and placement; I hadn’t stared at its bark. “She may not make it, ” he said. “Those are not new scars, could be beetles or some other insect – they’ve been at her awhile.”

As we discussed the possibilities of the King Crimson making it through the winter, he asked, “Are you sure your mother liked red maples?”

As a matter of fact, I wasn’t sure, and never had been. Wasn’t sure, even when dad first enthused about having a red maple planted at the Club, what the connection between mom and a red maple was. Mom wasn’t an outdoor type; I didn’t recall her ever naming a favorite tree or flower, or doing any gardening. That was dad’s domain, with us kids as his slaves. How many evenings was I mortified, having to water “under the eaves” during a rain shower, afraid someone I knew would pass by and see me watering in the rain. Mom was a city girl, Dad was a farm boy. I think it was Dad who had always loved red maples, and decided to love them in mom’s name, much the way he claimed to love their life while she drank her way out of it.

“Perhaps your mother is telling you something,” my contractor suggested. “Maybe she doesn’t want that red maple to live. ”

Mother died when she was only 66, the week before my father’s 70th birthday, which fell on Thanksgiving. We were all coming home to celebrate, the first time we would all be together in thirteen years. Mom had been anxious about the gathering: the pressure of making a big Thanksgiving feast overwhelmed her. “I’m done,” she had begun to say, when Laura, the youngest child left home to enter college. She had cooked and cleaned and sewed and one by one, we had moved off to college and into lives different from any she had ever imagined. She seemed diminished by each departure, less lively, less engaged, her alcohol consumption increased. “I think we never gave you kids enough direction” she’d complain. But what direction could she have given us – she whose only life outside the home was bridge and golf – leisure activities, not passionate pursuits? It was clear to me that she’d hoped I would become someone else, who or what, she couldn’t say, only not who I was –someone who charted a course the opposite of hers – someone who was never going to rely on a man for financial support or change her name. Finally, I realized she wanted intimacy in exchange for all she’d done for us: she wanted to see herself reflected in us, and when she looked at us, she couldn’t see herself at all.

After inspecting the Mother Memorial Red Maple for hours, and comparing its wounds to those on other trees in my yard, I realized the young male deer which proliferate in my yard must have scraped the bothersome fur from their young antlers against the bark of the tree. Their emergence must hurt, much the way children’s emerging teeth do, and rubbing against that bark salves the discomfort.

Perhaps, after all, Mother is in that tree, displaying what life had made of her: the solid form against which we all honed ourselves, soothed our growing pains, and left with no protection against the elements. Now, in that scarred, beautiful deep red maple, I see her.

Ann is the author of LIVING WITH A DEAD LANGUAGE; My Romance with Latin (Viking/Penguin, 2016) . Her essays have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Linga Franca, Society for Classical Studies, Oprah.com, The Bucket, Publishers’ Weekly, and The Toast. She was the founder and publisher of The Poseidon Press and an executive editor at Crown Publishers and Harcourt. She currently rusticates in the Hudson Valley, with her husband and dog.