Sycamore

Spent some more time with mom tonight going over more letters. A steady rain keeps up outside, much needed to water the plants we've struggled to keep alive. Outside mom's window, the enormous sycamore tosses its head and whispers deep things.

I first saw that sycamore one day when I came home from fifth grade, and it was a bony white stick, carefully planted in the ground. With a characteristic love for the absurd which mom gifted to us, we all mocked the stick, but carefully avoided treading on it or letting it become a victim of our carelessness. I wonder if our friends thought us odd for warning them to throw the football or ride the bikes away from the stick.

It seems now a symbol of my mother's strange hope, faith, and pessimism, because she planted it squarely under a power-line, half-convinced that it was futile to try to make things grow in the hard urban clay.

And now it sweeps with careless grace around the powerlines in a rowdy tangle frequently damned by utility workers but never yet by those of us who have to rake the leaves, and showing not the least concern for anything that might dampen its busy, thrilling life.

Now its arms lean in towards the window. Its dampened dark leaves seem to watch us.

I pick up cards and letters, read them, pass them over to mom. One is a card with a careless but firm scrawl: "To the most wonderful daughter in the world." It's a Valentine's Day card. 1961. She was 18.

She picks it up and turns it over in her fingers, reads it, touches one corner to her forehead, closes her eyes.

She doesn't like to smile: her smile is like a mask now. Her world seems to me to turn inward.

In my grandfather's wild, easy script I read a crack in her heart.

Maybe it will close soon.

She seems to be turning towards deeper feeling than the everyday world allows, and I think that love is a thing jammed in the ground, surrounded by faith and hope, cultivated, enormous in its fruition, with the power to wound the very earth with the power and thrust of its sucking roots.

She seems restless until she meets it again.