What the tree in my backyard taught me about life

On my first Mother’s Day as a mother, when my son Sawyer was just 6 weeks old, tiny, yet awe-inspiring, and still a mystery to me, his dad planted a tree between the house and the pool.

It was a young ash, its trunk not even as thick as a soda can. It was the perfect gift.

Trees do a lot for the world: clean the air, prevent erosion, provide shade. I wrote about how they can do even more than that.

I’d seen it in my own backyard. When we picked out the tree at the nursery, I told Jim, “I want something that he’ll be able to climb by the time he’s 5.”

“It will be,” he assured me, and it was. We hung a rope swing from its thickest branch.

The tree kept growing, taller and sturdier, just like the boy who climbed its branches.

It shaded a fort pushed up against its trunk. It’s where I sat, where it was cooler, while I watched kids play in the pool. We picnicked beneath it in the spring, stretching out afterward on blankets to read books by flashlight.

Planting it so close to the pool was a bad idea, I’m reminded every fall when it drops its leaves.

But the tree changes with the seasons. And so do we.

Trees remind us of that. That we grow and change. Life keeps moving forward.

I think it’s why so many of us plant trees when we lose someone, and we take solace from watching the trees grow. There is life after death.

Twenty years later, the tree Jim planted on my first Mother’s Day reaches well above the house.

Its steady growth, fallen leaves and new ones unfurling, the watering, fertilizing and pruning, and the spread of its branches toward the sky remind me, always, what it meant to be a mother, carefully tending to life.

His and mine.

Reach Karina Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com.