Day 210: 5 Minute Freewrite Prompt: tree

in #freewrite6 years ago (edited)

A tree wouldn't be grounds for divorce...right?


"Pinus of the Plains" by Carol Kean


HE HAD THAT Old School style. He had that dog and that cigar,


and that way about him, that hard-edged masculinity

which was regarded as a virtue, not a vice, in the era our parents grew up in.
Even my dad liked him, more or less, and Dad never liked anyone but "a man's man," whatever that was. I never did ask Dad what he'd think of "a woman's woman," and I won't even google it to see if there is such a thing.

I didn't have to google "bonsai white pine" to know I didn't want that tree. Jason saw it on clearance at the farm store, end of the season, a "bonsai" white pine, branches trimmed away to make the tree look twisted and full of character, as if it had grown out the rocky wall of a canyon. Which is where this particular white pine belonged.

He didn't listen to me,

a solid clue that it wasn't really about the tree--it was about him, and me.

My five minutes are up, but I'll keep going, and catch typos before posting

Pinus Monticola came between us.

(Pinus rhymes with Linus, Line-us, not Pee-nus)

Pinus Monticola, Western White Pine, is native to the Sierras of California.
Monticola means “mountain dweller.”

Pinus Strobus

is the eastern white pine, not that anyone cares at our garden center. If a magazine called some plant the latest trendy must-have, they would stock the plant, and never mind if it's an invasive species, like crownvetch. You've seen it, I know. That pink clover used as a ground cover along county roads. Yes, they sell this horror in stores, and people buy it.

Juniper, or red cedar,

is native to the Midwest. Western white pine.
Jason says our native red cedars are ugly. Brown all winter long, never a "nice" shade of green even in summer.

But, but, the little blue juniper berries are beautiful!

source

Birds love these scraggly, sharp junipers

for habitat as well as food. In dry sandy soil, in full sun or in shade, these natives dig in with their long, skinny roots and hold tight through Arctic blasts and summer scorchers. We Midwesterners, like our native flora and fauna, are hardy. Built to last.

That's what I married, hardy pioneer stock, a Clint Eastood of the Plains. Jason was a farm boy, whip-thin and whip-sharp, so I didn't figure him for a suburban homeowner type. Sure, he had a college degree and a white-collar job at a tractor factory, but he also had the common sense and can-do spirit that populated these Great Plains long ago, before paved roads, before telephones, before towns spread out onto the fruited plains, scraping away rich black topsoil to make room for housing developments.

He wasn't one of them

until after the wedding, after we found that in-town acreage for sale. He wasn't supposed to fall for the myth that Americans need lawns with golf-course green grass, a high-maintenance, non-native, Kentucky bluegrass or some other soft-on-the feet grass that had never evolved for harsh climes like ours. Mowing, watering, and all those 4-step chemical dumps--fertilizer, pre-emergent, dandelion killer, grub killer, people killer if you count the gradual toll of cancer, not to mention the birds, bees, bats, butterflies, and frogs dwindling as a slow and sneaky consequence of forcing something to live in a world too harsh for it.

Precious tree-hugging snowflake, he called me,

me, a farm girl in my own right, but also a fan of bunnies in the garden. I stopped him from shooting the possum in the compost heap. Possums eat up to five thousand ticks each, every year, and having detached bloated ticks from his collie even though we used the monthly preventives from the vet, Jason was on board with "Live and Let Live" for possums.

I will not comment on the juvenile raccoon.

You're welcome.

Shooting rabbits, or anything at all, is illegal in town. It's illegal even on an acreage, but that didn't matter to Jason. All our neighbors were on his side. They poisoned their dandelions and filed complaints about my native prairie restoration blowing wild things into their pristine green yards.

His Ill-Fated White Pine,

Pinus Monticola, was looking mighty fine, until the woodpecker hammered all those holes into it. Needles fell, and globs of sap oozed like candle wax buildup. Vindicated! Mother Nature herself was killing this tree I had tried in vain to keep out of our yard but it was on clearance, and he liked it, and that was that. He won the battle, and I was winning the war, but this wasn't my idea of a victory. Birds roosted in that tree. We'd been mowing around it since our sons were toddlers who couldn't wait to be big enough to drive a tractor. By the time they were big enough, mowing the lawn was the last thing they wanted to do.

Then came the night

when Jason hurled the Chuck-It ball for the now very-old collie. The ball pounded its way through the pine branches, a startling cloud of dust came poofing out.

"Huh. D'jou see that?" Jason hurled the ball a few more times, and more sawdust clouds blew out of the branches.


"Western white pine," I muttered. "Pinus Monitcola. Prone to--"

"Your what hurts?"

He got that line from my dad,

and that ticked me off more than his interrupting me and not listening. His tree was doomed, and our marriage was on the rocks, and he would never be able to grasp why, even if he listened to me trying to explain.

Okay, I wasn't really going to divorce him over a tree, or the backyard shootings of furry little intruders in the garden. He was Old School, hard-ass, and handsome as ever.

Then his absentee niece showed up at our door, with a husband, and a baby. The niece who hadn't spoken to her father for two years.

Not "one of us," this black-eyed foreigner she'd brought home,

this native of Khazakstan, a former Soviet republic. This guy, grew up in the mountains where Ghengis Khan once terrorized millions.

Jason's brother Jake wanted nothing to do with it, welcoming an immigrant into his family. Jake was just like Jason and every other American who'd plant non-native species in their yards, but bring in displaced humans from foreign lands, and suddenly they wanted to protect their turf.

How high-maintenance was a person, after all?

This darkly exotic man stood at our door with Jason's niece at his side and their offspring in her arms.

Maybe sibling rivalry, or maybe the fact that it wasn't his daughter bringing an invasive non-native species into the family, but Jason took to that little boy as if Kubi were his own grandson. Great-uncle is close enough, I guess. Our own offspring, two middle-school boys, had outgrown model trains and toy soldiers, but this little guy lit up and squealed with joy at every dang thing Jason showed him.

The care and feeding of a little boy

is considerably different from the Kentucky bluegrass or the western pine, and my hard-edged husband went soft. Jason, riding the lawn tractor with Kubi in his lap, smiling like a little boy himself, reminds me that humans are not logical or consistent or practical, after all.

Pine sawfly

is what ails Jason's Pinus Monticola, and according to the website, it's likely the tree will survive without a chemical intervention. I'll be keeping an eye on it, of course. Now that Jason's Pinus is twenty feet tall and a foot in diameter, it may have earned its right to occupy space in this turf.

I hope Kubie's real grandpa comes around,

but until he does, Jason is enjoying every minute we get with Kubi.

Note: this freewrite is totally FICTION, never mind that I used photos of my own family members.

Here is our youngest daughter, 98% European according to an ancestry DNA test, 2% Native (Algonquin, going back to 1800), pictured with her niece, our middle child's second baby, whose father is a native of Liberia.

Thank you, @mariannewest, for hosting Daily 5 Minute Freewrite!

Day 210: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: tree


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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics

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I love this freewrite @carolkean. The analogy of the ailing tree which you use has a deep subtext which bleeds through the narrative throughout and the honesty and rawness of the writing is just awesome. Love it :-)

Thank you, Raj!! Just when I had quit writing for a while, in part because my own mother won't read my fiction, your kind words came just when I needed 'em most. "Rawness" in my writing? Well, this may be new! Or you're just the first one to mention it. Someone "raw" and "writing" sound good together - not undercooked or half-baked. This is the beauty of 5 Minute Freewrites. If I had set out to write a 2,000 word story for a contest, I'd have trotted out some back story and more details than anyone wants. Maybe more "as it happens" would be good (a knock on the door, the niece, the stranger, the baby), but there's swift exposition and a fast-paced story, versus setting the stage and showing not telling -- but showing can take longer! Ok, I've said enough. Thanks again, you made my day, Raj!

Never let family get you down like that Carol. My grandfather used to be extremely dismissive of my writing so I know how it feels. It would be a real shame and waste of talent if you were to stop writing entirely! Also, I wanted to clarify, when I said raw, I meant like good sashimi. What I meant is that it flowed naturally, in a way that I found really engaging. This happens sometimes with me also on the freewrites, I produce something with a great pace and flow which is really good. I value the freewrites massively for this reason, I think I have a tendency to be too self critical and we're trained through the workshop process to expect the editing process to always be the best process. But now and again, just by letting the mind loose, I think excellent work is produced. That is how I feel about this story carol. Really great stuff :-)

I love you Raj!! My daughters and husband say this story is "disjointed" and hard to follow and meanders all over. I do take "rawness" and honesty as a compliment :) - I'm just so used to hearing "half-baked," I had to laugh. Your freewriting captures the flow and pace you speak of - which tells me I need to keep at the daily freewriting! Thanks again. Your grandfather has missed out on some great stories.

Lol . . . Yet one more thing in common.

Marek will read my haikus, but doesn't bother reading the narrative that follows. Ouch.

Congrats on the Curie. ;-)

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I should probably mention that in real life, I'm the one who bought that white pine, and I don't if it's Pinus East or Pinus West - just that it's taking a beating from those sawflies. For a third summer in a row. Chemical dump, or cut down the tree? In the years since I foolishly bought it, I've learned a lot about native species and the hidden costs (not just financial!) of bringing in exotics.

Yep. Plants that shouldn't be where they are rarely do well. I'm pretty interested in nature in general and actually used to work in a charity in the environmental sector so I know a bit about invasive plant species. I once had to take a day course on japanese knotweed. It was interesting for the first 4 hours then got a little much lol

Knotweed!! Eep! Thank heaven we've been spared knotweed and kudzu, but garlic mustard is the bane of my existence. Our natives can be bad enough: poison ivy (native!), greenbriar, and lots of scratchy, thorny, awful things that stick to dogs and shirts. (Why am I not surprised you did charity work --in the environmental sector !)

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