Essay: stephanie vogel

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In my childhood home, outside my bedroom window, I could see the birch tree. Sometimes my dad would mow the lawn in circles with it at the center, so our yard looked geometrically planned. That’s what happens when your dad’s an architect. My mom would plant impatiens under it that bloomed larger and larger through the summer into a multi-colored poof that seemed to protect it. It always looked so fragile against the wind, with its peeling skin.

If I looked out further into the boulevard, I could see the majestic weeping willow. It was the best climbing tree of the neighborhood and it functioned as ‘glue’ when we played hide-and-go-seek. As kids, my brother and I always had to be in earlier than my friends, but when it was technically bedtime, I was either reading with a flashlight under my covers or leaning out my window and watching the game finish. Some friends’ hands on that tree, ‘safe’, and the rest hidden in other bushes and trees all over the block-long boulevard as the unlucky looker loomed. Zulema, my best friend, and I used to daydream our double wedding happening under the tendrils of that willow.

The Johnsons had a magnolia in front of their house. Someone told me that magnolias were from the South, so I always thought of it as a visitor – only around for such a short time and just like that, all the petals were adorning the ground. Its splendor, over. It made me feel sad, like I’d grown out of another favorite dress. Or grandma and grandpa were going back to Arizona.

There was a huge forsythia right outside the kitchen window. I knew the Easter bunny was soon to appear when that fiery yellow appeared, as if from the ether. Mom would cut branches of the lemony tree to make a centerpiece for our Easter table, hanging little painted wooden eggs from them. Today when I think of spring, the image conjured is of forsythia.

In the back yard, we had three lilac bushes: purple, pink and white. The smell of early summer. My dad built us a platform ‘treehouse’ on top of our swing set. I loved sitting up there and just taking it in – probably my first legitimate deep breaths. I wanted as much as I could get. Zulema taught me that I could pull out one tiny bloom and suck on the narrow end and a mini-burst of sweetness would tickle my tongue. Mom saw us doing that and asked us to be sure not to strip the bush of all its blooms, offering popsicles instead.

I don’t have any adult memories of particular trees like I do of the trees of my youth. What did those Detroit trees have that their Vermont cousins don’t? There is a lilac outside my living room window with little buds appearing now. And a weeping willow on the front right edge of our yard that shed all its leaves just as we’d finished raking last fall. I need to start paying better attention.