The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [119]
We left Virginia when I was seven, and moved to Illinois. I lost the honeysuckle and the other trees of my early childhood—dog-wood, magnolia, sassafras, sycamore, and the enormous weeping willow and white oak of a nursery school in the countryside where my mother had enrolled me. I have only faint memories of the fabled cherry trees of Washington, D.C., and suspect that my memories of the blossoms come mainly from having been told about them and looking at family photographs.
Beach Park, Illinois, just north of Waukegan, was still rural in 1954; I walked to a four-room country school. We lived in a small, new suburb on acre lots, where the trees were saplings. But across from our house was a ploughed field with an island of tall trees in the center. Oak, elm, aspen. It was good to know that the trees were there, a brooding, comforting presence just across the road.
The trees of northern Illinois were lost to me when we moved to Honolulu in 1959, and I learned a new vocabulary. Banyan. Hala. Koa. Bamboo. I loved (and still love) the long arbor of Punahou Street. But my favorite tree on all of Oahu was (and is) the magnificent spreading monkeypod of Moanalua Gardens. Even the stench and incessant roar of traffic on an encroaching freeway doesn’t diminish its beauty. The other tree I came to love in Honolulu is the eucalyptus that stands by the wooden stairway of Old School Hall on my high-school campus, a building erected in the 1860s. It made me happy to study English in a building that had stood when Emily Dickinson was alive, and the stately tree, its bark variegated like a fragile nineteenth-century endpaper, seemed a suitable companion in that happiness.
I recall testing an ancient legend on the slopes of Kilauea, on the Big Island, with some high-school girlfriends. We picked several sassy, fringed blooms of the native lehua tree and, sure enough, were sprinkled with rain on our hike back to our lodge. I also recall harvesting bananas in our backyard, a process that involved arming myself with a machete and cutting down the entire tree—it is, in fact, a form of grass, a thick and pulpy weed. I shook out the spiders and let the tiny bananas, over twenty pounds worth, ripen in a paper sack. They’re much sweeter than anything you can buy in a grocery store. Years later that experience rescued me. At a cocktail party in New York City a man recently returned from Brazil declared that the trouble with America was that you couldn’t buy a decent machete. While I had no idea if the family machete was a good one or not, I was the only person in the group who’d actually used one, and what had been a dreary, sodden literary gathering became more interesting.
By the time I went to college, in Vermont, I had lost the language of deciduous trees. People had to name for me the maple, oak, sumac, and beech. I recognized birches from photographs and poems. As fine and fabled as it is, now that I’ve been on the Plains for over twenty years, New England foliage seems profligate to me, too showy. Here, in the fall, the groves of ash and poplars planted as windbreaks glow in a golden, Italianate light, and I feel as if I am in a painting by Giotto, or Fra Angelico. A dusty, spare, but lovely place in Tuscany, or western Dakota.
When, each December, I visit my family in Honolulu, I travel from the wintry Plains to what I call the green world. It is profligate to the extreme; in a yard not much bigger than my own is an enormous mango tree, and also lime, lemon, tangerine, pomegranate, pomelo, mountain apple, lichee, hibiscus, hala, lehua, plumeria, and Norfolk Island pine. Like many Hawaii residents, we often top a pine to make a Christmas tree.
After all of that, I find it an odd joy to return to winter, to a stark white landscape. And I dream of trees, wondering if sometimes I would rather dream of trees than have so many close at hand. Even when it means adjusting to a temperature more than one hundred degrees colder than in Hawaii, it’s the dryness