Stumps
Three generations cleared them; one generation replanted. Generation five swears the place must be enchanted.
It baffled me at first, more than thirty years ago, when my father brought home stumps and deposited them on the back acre. Seedlings - sure. But stumps? He found them for sale beside a road, my mother said. The seller even threw in delivery.
That made two crazy men.
I was in the East at the time, maybe in graduate school. Hearing over the phone about my father’s crackpot idea, I pictured two or three feet of heartwood sticking out of the ground, a trip hazard. Why on earth would someone buy and plant what everyone else was tearing out and grinding into dust?
![A chopping block in a field A chopping block in a field](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa11a9598-d3aa-4351-aa3f-591ac31a0693_3139x3609.jpeg)
I was not prepared for the sight of them, towers of grand old growth, notched by old-time logging crews. Three stumps stood separately on the lot, each one like the first house in a new subdivision, waiting for neighbors to give it the look of belonging. From soft, rotted places under the bark, seedlings nosed the air. Standing under them, at last I understood the allure: one part history, one part ecology, one part reparation.
Like many families that moved into Coast Salish territory from Europe or the eastern States, mine depended for the better part of a century on clearing the land. On one side of the family, we cleared to plant pastures and raise dairy cattle. On the other side, a great-grandfather logged the forests; great-aunts and uncles worked in the sawmill. A great-uncle drove a long-haul truck in and out of northwest timberland.
But even as they cut some trees for utility, they loved and prized others for reasons they did not need to articulate. One grandmother kept a small orchard on a wide city lot, picking apples for sauce every autumn. The other side of the family held reunions in a park called Forest, where a massive tree trunk with a hollow interior made an outdoor playroom for imaginative kids.
The imaginative kid never left my father. He liked to find things by the side of two-lane roads and carry them home: paintings from his favorite mountain artist; books from eclectic shops; seedlings, when they could be spared.
Then one day: stumps.
They made roosts for birds, catch-basins for rainwater, apartment houses for insects. Small mammals sheltered beneath them in grass gone wild. On Easter morning, it was discovered that some notches could hold a colored egg. With all this activity, new seedlings appeared frequently and were allowed to grow.
What grandparents had cleared, the grandchildren, my parents, slowly put back.
I come back for the first few days of summer, expecting to feel the solemnity of this history as I head up the rise past the garden and the weeping willow and the fire pit.
But the woods and I are giddy with spring and playful as a den of cubs. Throughout history, trees have been suspected of enchantment. The ones on my parents’ back acre are no exception.
Where my brother-in-law built a treehouse in Stump Grove One, for all the world, it looks like a magic beanstalk pushed its way up through a tiny cabin, knocked out a wall, punched through the roof, and kept going for that giant.
A little farther on, a tiny vibration in the foliage pulls me up short just before I walk into a small leaf twirling and swinging at eye level. I step back and raise my camera to catch whatever sprite or brownie or pixie lies curled in the leaf. But, as everyone knows, fairies cannot be caught on camera. (See video, 20 seconds.)
Under a Snowball Viburnum, I have the distinct impression that Oberon and Titania have been hanging decorations for a midsummer night’s dream, and I’ve just stumbled into it.
Through a screen of branches, I can just make out Stump One, which reminds me of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, the rock formation that inspired Steven Spielberg to think of alien spaceships. Douglas firs now surround and dwarf the old stump, so that nothing larger than a flotilla of fairies could land here.
A thin, white cloak covers the conifers, compliments of the towering cottonwoods. Dizzy with language and indifferent to the taxonomy of plants, I want to say there is a furze on all the firs. I like the sound of it, even if it does inspire botanists to cancel their subscriptions.
Every turn carries a provocation to metaphor.
If enchantment facilitates united states, I feel united here with the prior generations who lived so much among trees and would have liked—I feel certain—to stroll here in dancing light. A practical people mostly, they would find my words extravagant, but their eyes would twinkle, their good humors rise to the game.
My mother joins me between the garden and the upper ground, drawing my attention to the fruit beginning to grow on the branches of dwarf apples and pears. I remember when, back around 1990, Dad gave her this orchard for Christmas. He propped the bundle of sticks in the front doorway and rang the doorbell. A dozen sticks met her with tags attached: some apples, pears, nuts, a fig, and so on. He called it an orchard.
Mom lit up over her orchard, although the two of them were able to compass the whole of it in their four hands. Where I looked out the front door and saw a bundle of sticks, they looked out and saw, with future-facing, enchanted eyes, the fruitful, half-wild acre that sticks and stumps would eventually become.
True, a twirl of leaf and a curl of light
May not furl us together,
But then — they might.
The magic of the trees ;)
There is no word for this post other than enchanted. And the poem, dropped like a golden leaf from the highest branch ... thank you!