I spent days burning the stump. Burning it and chipping the charcoal with a wobbly pick, and burning it again. It was once a cypress tree with a tunnel through its branches, dark and fragrant, leading to a flattened crown. There, standing with our toes braced on the flaky bark, we’d fly our homemade kites. We made them out of flower stems plucked from thickets of grass tall as we were. The edges of the grass licked cuts up our arms during harvest. Each dried stem was yellow, light, and strong. With wrapped thread and patience, we arranged them into octagonal flares, notched the ends, and gave them frames of thread. Next, we attached panes of colored tissue paper like stained glass.
The trick was to get the kite up on a gust before it could tangle in the branches, blow into the nearby avocado tree, or fall into the neighbor’s yard.
Sometimes I’d slink through the cypress tunnel with a book and a sandwich, twigs catching at my skin, and sticky dimes of sap suctioning my palm to a branch, as though the tree wanted to hold me.
The cypress was still there when we moved away, renting the house to a parade of families, a church group, an elementary school, and assorted missionaries. At some point, the tree died and was cut. When, years later, I moved back to the house, I found only the stump, sheared at ground level and lost in a sea of grass.
I don’t know who planted the tree or how long it lived, but the house is old. It has stood for close to a hundred years, as near as we can tell—an adobe house with 18-inch walls and airy wooden ceilings. Rooms leading onto a long porch with windows into the yard. In the cold months, the sun falls through the panes in parallelograms. I used to lie on the sun-warmed floor, reading.
The house lived in nostalgia for so long. When I came back, aching for a place to be, I found it thick with dirt, spiderwebs, filth-crusted windows. Chipped plaster, molded paint, dust raining from the attic with each new roaring-by truck. Sometimes, rain would torrent from the sky, pouring in alarming streams into the corner of the kitchen, dripping through the ceiling boards. Even at one in the morning, I’d haul myself up the ladder into the attic with the mouse droppings and scramble to place empty paint buckets and yogurt containers under twenty-six different leaks, my headlight catching the slick of rain pooling around the beams, dropping one way or another, making damp moon-craters in the inch-thick dust.
Then the streets emptied abruptly, became silent as tombs except for the police patrols sounding their eerie sirens, announcing shut-downs, isolation, and limited market hours. And I was left to myself in a spacious house that was more construction zone than home, to a grass and tree-filled yard, and the touch of the sun. It could have been much worse. But I was alone. Deeply, terribly, unrelentingly. I didn’t know how to fix the cracks or repair the toilet innards. I vacuumed decades of attic dust. I fell ill. I lay on the floor, unable to summon the energy to move.
Slowly, slowly, the world opened back up. The loneliness eased a little. But it had soaked into me, into my soul, sent cracks ripping through me from roof to foundation like the ones slashing the old dining room. Every time I returned to the house after a trip away, it felt like dread, a grimace, suffocation. But I stayed. Where could I go and not take my peril with me?
I still don’t know how the cypress died. Did it dessicate? Grow sick at heart? Did it starve for affection, no longer made joyous by children’s hands and feet slinking through its dark, sweet tunnel, laughter breathy on their lips? Did it, like a kite, lose its tether and drift into the zapping embrace of a power line, rained upon, its tissue paper melting into fibrous puddles?
Half a decade, I’ve lived here now. When I return from errands in town, pushing open the heavy mahogany door, traffic dims to a murmur, and the old house welcomes me in like peace. Sunlight still falls in parallelograms through the windows. The porch is bright and filled with books, house plants, and a reading nook. Walls made of earth hold in warmth, standing strong. My prayers lie thick as mortar between the adobe.
I love lying on the sun-soaked slate of the sidewalk, love watching the sparrows and grackles and hummingbirds. Love the way raindrops rim maturing avocados. Love the juicy figs that grow from the tree I planted in the burned-out cypress trunk. I wonder if its roots embrace the old tree, easing it into death, drawing nutrients from its decay, calling them back into sunlight and wide leaves, branching arms reaching toward infinity. It makes me even more grateful for the slow growth of community. Tentative rootworms wending skinnily through the dark. Fingers knotting finicky threads. Toes wiggling in grass that is either bendy green or stabbing yellow, depending on the season. Laughter ringing my table as friends and family gather for games, meals, prayers, and conversation.
And I think again of the tunnel through the old cypress. I think of the paths that roots take, wayfinding through hard-packed lonely darkness, anchoring the trunk and branches, drawing nourishment from hidden places, creating skyward growth.