My favorite tree had a fence in it.
Politely standing sentry at the edge of a park on Alpena’s northeast side, the unassuming Manitoba maple (my son just finished a leaf project in his high school botany class, so I made him identify it for me) wasn’t the sort of tree that made you long to climb its limbs or rest against its warm trunk.
It bore no particular beauty to make a passerby look twice.
It did have a fence in it, though.
From a distance, it looked much like any other tree. Only a slight curve, where it had righted itself after its run-in with the wires, betrayed that it had a fence in its belly.
***
Some of my favorite people have fences in them.
Somewhere back in time, people I love found themselves up against it. In a tough place. Beaten down by fear, by addiction, by pain, by despair.
Today, those barriers, for those people I love, have faded into the past, but they’re not gone.
They’re simply swallowed up, mid-trunk, now a part of the person my people have become.
Some people grow straight and tall, their paths never impeded, their perfect trunks the glory of the woods.
I can’t help loving the crooked people best, though.
The ones with fences in them.
The ones who carry their pasts in their bellies but determinedly grow on, accepting what was and facing toward what will be.
***
Recently, I went back to visit my tree.
Someone had cut it down.
I don’t fault whoever did it. They probably just wanted to clean the fence up a little ― and, it turns out, people don’t love the species as much as I loved my tree.
Online writers call the Manitoba maple “invasive, weedy, messy.”
“Manitoba maples grow everywhere, mostly where you don't want them,” one site says.
“Never plant Manitoba maples unless nothing else will grow!” another cautions.
Of course, the trees have their upside, too. They make lovely carved bowls and other turned-wood creations, according to the internet.
Unlike many other tree species, Manitoba maples produce separate male and female trees ― which is probably pretty cool, although, let's be honest, I don’t know what that means and, frankly, don’t want to know.
All of that matters not. What matters is that my tree had a fence in it.
And someone cut it down.
I patted what was left of my tree’s gray trunk, cried, told it it had been strong and brave. I smelled it, took its picture, shuffled the wood chips on the ground with the toe of my shoe, cried a little more.
The nice couple passing on the sidewalk walked a little faster.
The thing is ― I wanted that tree to be OK.
I wanted to believe trees with fences in them can make it.
Look around you.
How many fence-middled trees do you think are out there? The people you know, the people you love, the people you work with, and the strangers at the grocery store ― how many of them could tell you about the fence in their past, the one they leaned into because there was no other way, the one that hurt and befuddled and seemed insurmountable until they somehow landed on the other side?
How many of them are who they are because of what they’ve grown through?
We expect people to make sense and do right and obey traffic laws and make good decisions. And, time after time, they do. People are amazing. But they’re not amazing because they’re amazing ― they’re amazing because they go to work and wash the dishes and feed the cats and stop at stop signs and bake chocolate chip cookies with fences in their bellies that nobody will ever see but them.
They keep going. They keep growing. They live.
It floors me, truly. People every day face barriers small and large and impossible and they just keep going.
It’s so lovely it hurts.
And, when life upends and a virus separates and anger ignites and headlines horrify, somehow, people keep going.
They make it to the other side.
And the Everyday Faith part of all this is simply this: shout-out to God for making humans.
And trees.
And fences.
Even the ones we have to grow through.
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