The Cherry Tree — Story Time

“Please don’t cut her down”

Jan lent against the rotting beam of her porch, squinting into the afternoon sky. It was late October and the sun shone on her skin, illuminating the deep lines of life around her mouth that framed the gray of her eyes.

“It has a life you know, it is older than me and you a thousand times over, the things she has seen Lily”

I shrugged, feeling guilty and unimportant. I was 9 and didn’t know what to say. We lived in Portland, Oregon in a wooden house with a porch painted blue, the color of a crayon. I used to boast that our house stood 3 stories tall, including a backyard where we had a tire swing and fish pond full of guppies. These things mattered in 3rd grade politics. Tommy’s mom had a wine cellar and 2 cars. Zach and Anna had 4 chickens and 2 Dads. We traded snippets of our lives like marbles, presenting the shiniest ones, leaving the darker details tucked safely away in our lockers.

We moved from California to Portland when my Dad left the Berkeley Police Department and became an ATF agent. His life changed and so did ours. My Dad went from patrolling the sun-soaked streets to a cubicle, surrounded by bulletin boards of accused terrorist, drug lords and weapons deals. Poncherello to Jason Borne.

Being brought up by Korean immigrants, my dad had a strange combination of spirituality, belief in balance and an underlying roughness that came from the Korean belief that play is second to hard work. His father was cruel, he was hardened for life before he ever had a chance. So, that afternoon when he told me we were going for a drive, I felt uneasy. The sun was pouring through the car window. I remember feeling car sick and my legs were burning on the cracked leather of the seats. I looked over and saw his window was closed, I was afraid to open mine so I just sat there and hummed along to Don McLean’s Greatest Hits.

We drove to Home Depot, where my dad bought a chainsaw and bought me some chocolate covered raisins.

“It’s coming down today” His eyes were glassy, and he laughed in his charismatic wild way. I knew he was talking about the Cherry Tree. He’d wanted to cut it down for a long time. He felt it took up too much space, it had never given us fruit and it was useless in his eyes, a failure.

“Is there something wrong with it, is it sick?” I asked my mom when we got home. We sat on the steps to the house as she ran her cold fingers through my hair.

“No, it’s just your Dad being silly. He’s always had a grudge against that tree ever since we bought the house.”

“But Jan loves it, I see her looking at it all the time”

Jan was our closest neighbor. She was a Native American, a direct descendent of the Multnomah, a tribe of Chinookan people who had been the original inhabitants of the Portland basin and on both sides of the Columbian River. My sister and I watched her all the time, two little girls peering through the rhododendron bush that divided our porches. Until one day she came over with 2 Mickey Mouse coloring books and we were firm friends. Jan had taken us to a pow wow in a conference center near her families reservation. We ate frybread, drenched in butter, cinnamon and sugar. Jan bought us a dream catcher each. Mine was beautiful, the tanned and dyed animal skin wrapped a thousand times around a piece of birch, representing the circle of life. The beads shiny and small, like the black springtails that used to eat our yellow roses. She smelled of Palo Santo and baking. Her voice was a knowing hum, like water pulsing under a gorge. I knew Jan would be upset about Dad chopping down the tree. Mom and I knew if we said anything it would only make things worse. I wouldn’t know it then but this was the beginning of my Dad’s illness, the Bipolar that he would never acknowledge, but would take him away from us forever. This would be our last year together as something that resembled a nuclear, happy family.

Mom and I often sat like this, on the steps entwined. She took the hair tie from her wrist and wrapped it around the bottom of my braid.

“Best not to get involved Darling”.

My Dad didn’t believe that the Cherry Tree had a soul, he didn’t believe in ghosts or therapy.

He didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t prove, harness or understand. The curse of fear. So when Jan pleaded with him to spare the tree, he laughed unkindly. I was ashamed but too afraid to stand up for the tree, for Jan, for what I knew I believed in.

He chopped it down with a few pulses of a chainsaw. I remember thinking I could hear the cherry tree screaming. A guttural moan intermixed with the sickening whirl of the saw. My sister and I sat on the porch with my mom, we all cried, wiping our face when we thought my Dad might see. My Dad chopped it up and handed out the firewood to our neighbors, including Jan. It struck me that he though he was being kind. I thought he had murdered Jan’s daughter and had presented her with her limbs.

Lizzie and I drew what we thought were Native American burial symbols in chalk on the naked wood of the stump. We put special rocks that we had painted with markers around our fallen tree comrade. Bluebells, hollyhocks, daily offerings of blood red rhododendron, strewn around the naked limb. One day when Dad was at work, I wrote a very sophisticated 9 year old poem about life, death and trees. My little sister, Lizzie, drew her idea of tree heaven, fully equipped with a tree husband and all the tree money available. We knocked on Jan’s door and presented them to her. She hadn’t been out on her porch or said hello to us since the cherry tree was cut down. Years later my mom admitted she was forever fearful of a confrontation between my Dad and Jan, My Dad and our teachers, my Dad and his boss, my Dad and just about everyone. She had been keeping the peace for years with so many. He was like a caged animal then, swinging between mania, anger, exhaustion and guilt.

So there we were at Jan’s front door. We held up our offering to her, and I remember her face crumpling, her gray eyes glassy, like the nearby Willamette River, after a good bout of rain. Jan squeezed us in tight. “There’s hope for this world then. Don’t ever stop seeing”.

I’ve since been back to my old childhood home on 52nd Avenue. Jan is gone, gone to live with her grandchildren so I’m told, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she too has returned to the earth. I was overcome with emotion when I saw it. The cherry tree, small but with new shoots and branches. I laughed as I realized in his blind hatred for the tree, my Dad had forgot to kill the roots. There she was, not as large as before, but just as resilient and full of new life. My old friend, my cherry tree teacher. I hope to go back there again one day, and rest my back on a long and healthy trunk and wonder if she’ll recognize the girl who sits beside her.