Tag Archives: Tree

Excerpt from ‘The Butterfly Tree’

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here) and orderable at all bookshops.

“Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde famously asserted and his words proved eerily accurate a month ago when my 97-year-old father, a surgeon turned patient, was battling cancer to the courageous end.

One night, after Pop’s breathing had grown shallower by the day and more and labored by the hour, I read him the excerpt below from my newly released novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations.”

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“What I want you to promise me,” Doc said—breathe—“is that you’ll grieve only one day for me.” Breathe. “After one day, dry your eyes and focus on always remembering our good times together”—breathe—“and never forgetting how much I love you.”

Tears bathed his twin sons’ cheeks.

“There’s something I never told you”—breathe—“and probably should have,” Doc, now 83, continued weakly, pneumonia’s grip growing strong. With effort he proceeded to share the depths of his long-ago widower’s bereavement and suicide attempt, including the exploding ether bottle that awakened him the night his house burned down. “So you see”—breathe—“you boys saved my life.”

“We had no idea,” said Lemuel.

“We’ll still never say who really started that fire,” Jamis said, impishly.

“I have my suspicion,” Doc retorted, winking intimately at Jay-Jay.

Turning serious again: “As I’ve often told you, try to make each day your masterpiece. Breathe. If you’re successful doing that most days, day after day and week after month after year”—breathe—“when you get to the end of your adventure you’ll have lived a masterpiece life. Breathe. I’ve made some flawed brushstrokes, certainly, but all in all, I’m pleased”—breathe—“with my life’s painting. Yes, I feel happy and fulfilled. My only real regret”—breathe—“is that it’s all passed by so swiftly, in a blink it seems. Breathe. I feel like I did when I was a kid on the pony ride at the fair”—breathe—“I want to go around one more time.”

Jamis leaned over and hugged Doc, embracing his Pops longer than he ever had, and still it was far too brief. Lem, lightly stroking Doc’s left arm, suddenly realized the brushstroke-like birthmark resembled Halley’s Comet—The tail of a comet that Grandma warned us would bring tears, he thought.

Doc slept for most of the next two days, awaking only for short spells—including evening shaves from the town barber, Jonny Gold. Breathing became more labored as his failing lungs slowly filled with drowning fluid. During Connie’s illness long before, and again with Alycia’s not so long ago, Doc lovingly told them it was okay to “let go” rather than suffer. But he found it impossible to grant himself similar merciful permission.

Jamis and Lem gave it instead.

“Keep fighting if it’s for you, Pops,” Jamis said, his tone tender as a requiem. “But if you’re doing it for Lem and me, we’ll be okay—go be with Aly and Connie. We love you beyond all measure.”

“We’ll never forget your love,” Lem whispered, his lips brushing his namesake’s ear.

Doc opened his eyes, blue-grey like the ocean on a cloudy day, and with clear recognition grinned fragilely at Jamis, then at Lem, letting them know he heard their lovely words. His eyelids lowered shut as he squeezed his sons’ hands and whistle-hummed, almost inaudibly, before being gently spirited away.

*

When I finished reading, and then echoed the twins’ words with my own, my dad opened his ocean-hued eyes, briefly; smiled, faintly; gave my hand a tender squeeze, lengthily; and death imitated art before my next visit the following day.

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            Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Excerpt from “The Butterfly Tree” by Woody Woodburn, BarkingBoxer Press, all rights reserved, now available at Amazon and other online booksellers and many bookshops. Woody can be contacted at woodywriter@gmail.com.

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Lovely ‘Poem’ Becomes Woodchips

by Woody

One hundred nine rings in an oak stump ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in America poetry:

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.

I thought of these words as I looked out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into woodchips and trucked away.

It was like seeing a theatrical street version of Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book “The Giving Tree” starring two workmen in white hardhats and optic-yellow vests. Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs would not be used to build a house for the grown boy; its trunk not crafted into a boat to sail the seas; when the workmen’s work was finished, there was not even a stump left to sit and rest upon.

Majestically tall, its trunk too thick to reach one’s arms around, the tree had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa that was in danger of being toppled by a strong wind.

And so, beginning at 9 o’clock, a loud-crying chainsaw turned morning into mourning as a workman in a gargantuan cherry-picker amputated the branches one by one by one, thicker to smaller, as he hydraulically rose higher, higher, higher.

The felled branches were next cut into manageable lengths and fed into a woodchipper. The lines of a “poem” went in, mulch came out.

Lastly, the towering barren trunk came down. Instead of being made into long lumber for a home or boat, it was sawed into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.

It was not my tree, not in my yard, and yet all the same it was mine, and yours too, because trees are for all of us to enjoy. From start to finish, what took many decades to become living poetry was erased in less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.

Kilmer again: A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.

            No more birds will nest in the lovely tree I used to see out my east-facing kitchen window, the rising sun climbing its branches each day.

The melancholy event gave me pause thinking about a handful of memorable trees in my life: The evergreen beside the driveway of my first boyhood home that my two older brothers and I attempted blind shots over during games of H-O-R-S-E. The sturdy buckeye we swung Tarzan-style from a rope near a pond. The apple tree I picked snacks off of on a shortcut home from grade school. The orange tree my two kids helped me plant when they were in grade school. The giant redwoods we saw, in awe, as a family. And on and on.

I think “poems” fill all our lives more than we generally realize. We draw trees in kindergarten and climb trees as older kids and hopefully at least once plant a tree, for as the Greek proverb states: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Old women, too.

Kilmer once more: Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.

Afterwards, this fool walked over to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below ground and covered with dirt. I may be overestimating its age by half, but I like to think it sprouted in 1913 – the same year “Trees” came into being.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

A Book A Tree, A Tree And A Book

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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A Book And A Tree,

A Tree And A Book

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” John Muir wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

So it is that a book in New York City is hitched to a tree in Central California; and that tree is hitched to a tree in Camarillo; which in turn is hitched to a book in Ventura. This circle of life, so to speak – trees becoming books and books leading to trees – includes a death, but begins with a birthday.

As birthday gift a couple years past, my son gave me a book. Rather, knowing my passion for books and literacy and libraries, he donated a new volume in my honor to the New York Public Library.

A commemorative nameplate on the first page inside its front cover reads: “In honor of my Dad – Thank you for teaching me to make each day a masterpiece, drink deeply from good books, and make friendship a fine art.”

Those are my top three of John Wooden’s “Seven-Point Creed.” To be told that these lessons from my beloved mentor have successfully been passed down like a priceless heirloom to my son put birdsong in my heart.

You may be curious as to the title of the gifted pages. I certainly was and specifically wondered which of my all-time favorites my son chose: “The Old Man and the Sea”? Perhaps “The Grapes of Wrath” or “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”? Or maybe my childhood treasure “Where The Wild Things Are”?

Alas, my son had no say in the selection and was not informed which book was purchased. When I contacted the NYPL and asked I was told no specific records are kept.

“You’ll have to find it yourself,” the employee joked.

Here’s the punch line: If placed end to end, there are 63.3 miles of shelves in the NYPL’s main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Indeed, one would need endless “Patience” and unlimited “Fortitude” – the names of the two iconic marble lions proudly standing guard at the front entrance – to find my honorary nameplate in one of the 3 million volumes within. Finding a needle in a vast hayfield would be less impossible.

In truth, not knowing which title bears my nameplate in no way diminishes the specialness of the gift because now I can imagine it to be any book at all. With this insight, I gave a dear friend of mine a similar gift she will never find – a memorial tree planted in Sierra National Forest after her sister passed away.

Upon the death of another of her loved ones, my friend thought of the faraway tree she has seen only in her imagination.

“Your gift deeply moved my soul,” she told me kindly, “and inspired me to purchase a Chinese Elm – ‘Tree of Harmony’ – for my family to put in the Friendship Garden at our church in honor of my sister and brother-in-law.”

Together, she and her husband and their three children personally planted the skinny eight-foot-tall elm and surrounded it with a circular perimeter of large stones. She expressed comfort in knowing their Tree of Harmony will always be there to visit.

Inspiration seeds inspiration. To be able to see a specific tree through the forest, as it were, inspired me to donate a book – of my choosing, this time – to a local library. I won’t give away its title, but I will tell you the handwritten inscription inside reads:

“Make each day a masterpiece, drink deeply from good books like this one, and make friendship a fine art.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Tree-mendous emails

by Woody

Aussie emails are Tree-mendous

Trees have inspired much superb writing, such as Joyce Kilmer’s beautiful poem “Trees” that begins, “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree” and ends, “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”

Also in stanza, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned: “I hear the wind among the trees / Playing the celestial symphonies;

“I see the branches downward bent, / Like keys of some great instrument.”1Tree

John Muir, among volumes on the subject, wrote: “It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree.”

While writing about trees is a familiar age-old practice, what about writing to a tree?

This is actually happening in Melbourne, Australia, where the city has assigned ID numbers and email addresses to its trees so that citizens can easily report problems such as dangerous dangling branches.

A tree-mendous thing followed: people began writing love-letter emails –and you just know trees, unlike people, greatly prefer emails over handwritten notes on, egads!, paper – by the thousands, to their favorite trees.

“My dearest Ulmus,” began one love note to a green-leaf elm. “As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.”

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Here is another. “To: Algerian Oak, Tree ID 1032705

“Dear Algerian Oak,

“Thank you for giving us oxygen. Thank you for being so pretty. I don’t know where I’d be without you to extract my carbon dioxide. Stay strong; stand tall amongst the crowd. You are the gift that keeps on giving. Hopefully one day our environment will be our priority.”

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From a student. “To: Green Leaf Elm, Tree ID 1022165  

“Dear Green Leaf Elm,

“I hope you like living at St. Mary’s. Most of the time I like it too. I have exams coming up and I should be busy studying. You do not have exams because you are a tree. I don’t think that there is much more to talk about as we don’t have a lot in common, you being a tree and such. But I’m glad we’re in this together.

“Cheers, F.”

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I especially like this sweet note from an admirer of a golden elm.

“Dear 1037148,

“You deserve to be known by more than a number. I love you. Always and forever.”

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Like Tree-No.1037148-Hugger, I have loved always and forever many trees in my life. If they had their own email addresses, here are some notes I would like to send them.

Dear Evergreen Beside My Boyhood Home Driveway,

Do you remember when I was small how I used to pretend you were a basketball defender and I would hoist shots over you with all my little-boy might? I imagine you are so tall now there is not a shooter alive whose shot you cannot block!

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Dear My Favorite Majestic Tree in Ojai’s Libbey Park,

Thank you for the cool shade you have provided me over the decades during the Ojai Tennis Tournament.

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Dear Mariposa Grove Sequoia Sempervirens,

I had never before seen trees like you / Tall as skyscrapers from a sidewalk’s view

Oxygen you give and my breath you take / Awesomeness like thee only God could make

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Dear “Two Trees”,

Thank you, thank you for your aesthetic beauty and for holding vigilant twin sentinel over Ventura.

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Dear Mighty Oak In My Grade School Friend Jim’s Backyard,

Thank you for so perfectly holding up the best tree house I have ever been in.

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Dear Birch In My Front Yard,

You stand a little bent and crooked, like an elderly woman in need of a cane, and yet you are still lovely and strong and I love the way your leaves filter the evening sunlight before it comes through the window. I look forward to hearing the wind play celestial symphonies on your downward branches for decades to come.

With love,

Woody

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Column: “Poem” is now Wood Chips

by Woody

From Lovely “Poem” to Wood Chips

One hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in American poetry:

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.

The other morning I looked out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into wood chips and trucked away.

It was like seeing a theatrical street version of Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book “The Giving Tree” starring two workmen in white hard hats and optic-yellow vests.

Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs were not used to build a house for the grown boy; its trunk not crafted into a boat to sail the seas. When the workmen’s work was finished, there was not even a stump left to sit and rest upon.

An arborist could tell you what type of tree this was, but I cannot. Were I to venture a guess, wise readers would surely point out my ignorance. No matter. What is important is it was majestic, perhaps 70 feet tall and leafy with a trunk I could not reach my arms around.

Something else important: the tree had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa, cracking and raising a section of sidewalk. And if it toppled, it would fall across a busy street. Too large to be braced or straightened, the tree was a danger that surely needed to come down.

And so at 9 a.m., a whining chain saw turned an overcast morning tenfold gloomier. Standing in the basket of a gargantuan cherry-picker, a workman cut off the large branches one by one by one as he hydraulically rose higher and higher and higher.

Far below, the felled branches were cut into manageable lengths and fed into a wood chipper that roared like a jet engine. Lines of a “poem” went in, mulch came out.

And then the tall, barren trunk came down, made not into lumber for a home or boat, but into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.

From start to finish, what took decades and decades to become living poetry was eliminated in less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.

It was not my tree, not in my yard, and yet it was mine and yours because trees are for all of us to enjoy. Trees are one of nature’s Hallmark cards — an ironic thought since some trees literally become greeting cards. Or, more irony here, newsprint.

Kilmer again: A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.

No more birds will nest in the lovely tree I used to see out my kitchen window looking east, the sun rising above it in the late spring mornings.

The melancholy event gave me pause to think about a handful of memorable trees in my life: The evergreen beside the driveway of my first boyhood home that my two older brothers and I attempted blind shots over during games of H-O-R-S-E. The sturdy buckeye near a swimming hole that we swung from on a rope. The apple tree I picked snacks off on a shortcut home from school. The orange tree my two then-young kids and I planted. The giant redwoods we saw, in awe, as a family. And on and on.

I think “poems” fill all our lives more than we generally realize. We draw trees in kindergarten and climb trees as older kids and hopefully at least once plant a tree, for as the Greek proverb states: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Kilmer once more:

Afterward, this columnist fool walked over to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below the ground and covered with dirt.

I may be overestimating by half, but I like to think this tree had sprouted in 1913, the same year as “Trees” came into being.

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(Published 5-4-13 in Ventura County Star)