Clustered thickly on a flat, unbroken surface softened by layers of accumulated leaves, the oak trees in the back yard epitomized routine; they were monolithic, immovable, and blandly brown through all seasons.
On the other side of the house, unseen by the oaks, a single cherry tree bloomed in spring and blazed in fall from the center of our sloping front yard.
The oaks, visible from the kitchen, school room, and playroom, represented my public life, our family’s shared life. The cherry tree, glimpsed from the living room, my bedroom, and my parent’s room, I would visit in moments of solitude.
When I wanted to feel alone and alive, open and aware of my own mind, I would creep silently out the front door to sit on the concrete stoop. It was here I would try on ideas and concepts that, like the young cherry tree, were fragile and delicate, too small, too wispy, too unformed to bear my full weight.
I would think of music, of marriage, and of words.
Although I had taken piano lessons since I was six, first from mom and then from our church pianist, it wasn’t until I acquired a new teacher in Reston that a piano teacher asked me to play with feeling. It was no longer enough to get the notes right, the tempo right, the rhythm right. I was to invite my audience to feel.
Entranced by this revelation of music’s capacity to convey ideas and emotions, I spent long afternoons at the piano which was tucked neatly between two windows overlooking the cherry tree. I played with the windows open whenever the weather allowed, hoping that someone in our small cul-de-sac, perhaps a neighbor or the mailman, might be inspired or moved or, at the very least, impressed.
Behind the piano, oriental wallpaper featured strikingly dark branches suffused in petals of soft gold, pink, and cream that bloomed on even when the cherry tree had laid aside its raiment for the year. Although I didn’t care for the wallpaper in other contexts because it clashed with Mom’s traditional Scandinavian décor, I thrilled with satisfaction when I pondered that cherry trees are native to Asia and that right outside this oriental wallpaper depicting cherry blossoms stands a real cherry tree. Fingers caressing the keys, mulling the relationship of wallpaper and tree, I would explore the borders of representation and reality as I interpreted black and white notation into living melody.
Yet, despite my efforts at the piano and my pleasure at my growing skills, the piano itself began to feel pedestrian.
Almost everyone I knew could play the piano at least passably. Or at least they could all play Heart and Soul and the first few bars of Für Elise, and isn’t that the measure of knowing your way around a piano in elementary school?
I thought of how elaborate the piano was compared to say, my sister’s violin—sweet and simple and portable. I considered how removed the pianist is from the sound created; the actual percussion occurs second hand and hidden from sight. I wished for an instrument both more unique and less complex.
A glorious visit on a brisk sunny Saturday to a craft fair in a faithfully preserved historic town gave me a direction.
From before I can remember, I have ached for the ancient, the timeless, the authentic. I’m the kind of person who, time permitting, would make my own soap and clothes and bread and baskets for the deep pleasure of carrying on age-old tasks. At the craft fair, I discovered the Appalachian dulcimer, a tear-shaped wooden instrument laid across the lap to play, its strings strummed in accompaniment to ballads brought centuries ago across the Atlantic to the hollows and ridges of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains.
I reveled in the smooth cherrywood body, in the carved wooden tuning pegs, in the sweet, plaintive notes, in the deep undertones of the drone strings. Alongside the dulcimer itself, I instantly fell for ballads—their haunting words, themes, and melodies. The same part of me that thrills at building a genuine log cabin from trees felled in our own yard and that loves homemade bread of freshly ground grain, knew I needed a dulcimer. I had found what I had sought.
For six months I saved for one until, in March on my tenth birthday, I had enough. I purchased a beautifully handcrafted dulcimer from Bill Keith of the Mill Run Dulcimer Band and received an instruction book and two recordings from the band to boot. By Mother’s Day, I had composed my first original song in honor of my mother, and I played it for her in the living room in sight of the cherry tree.
Swathed in a profusion of fresh, white blossoms, the cherry tree in spring suggested a bride arrayed in living lace. She swayed and bowed deferentially as the wind passed by and sent after him whispered secrets soft as a sigh and sweet with her scent.
The cherry tree suggested visions of romance and, under her gentle influence, my mind would turn to the boys I knew and wonder what might lie between us in the future. Yet my ideas of marriage have ever been practical and prosaic.
The first boy I ever liked I had left back in Texas. I had appreciated that he always sat next to me in Sunday school, but this pleasure was tempered because he always smelled like maple syrup—the scent as thick and cloying as the syrup itself. Once, while I ate dinner with his family, his parents had argued about whether or not to serve peas. I remember deciding I didn’t want in-laws who argued so heatedly about something as silly as peas and removed him from future consideration, but I still missed him when we moved.
Now, although crushes were off limits in the courtship culture my family subscribed to, I often tried out the idea of marrying various boys I knew while doing chores, a time when my hands were busy but my mind was free. As I cleaned the bathrooms in the morning, I would imagine that I was cleaning a bathroom belonging to me and _____.
It turns out that pretending to clean a boy’s bathroom can tell you a lot.
I carefully noticed how I felt upon selecting a boy. Did I instantly become tense? Did it feel like he would criticize if the bathroom wasn’t perfect? Did I believe I would always be the one cleaning the bathroom or was this just my turn and he had cleaned it last time? Was he working nearby or was he lounging in the next room unaware of my efforts? Was the bathroom of my imagination a wreck or did it just need a little straightening? Would I feel comfortable or uneasy when I turned the corner into our room? Would I feel embarrassed or nonchalant that I smelled like bathroom cleaner?
I mulled similar questions as I balanced the family checkbook and paid the family bills each month at a computer desk overlooking the cherry tree which, though possessing such presence in person, looked surprisingly diminutive from the second story dormer window.
Dad had assigned me these tasks and over several months had patiently taught me how to complete them. I loved how grown up and competent they made me feel. It was easy to imagine myself married and managing a household budget. I wondered. Would my husband stay within his means or spend impulsively? Would he be miserly or generous with those in need? Would our budget be rigidly inflexible or leave a little wiggle room?
In many ways, at the ripe old age of ten, I related less to the springtime bride in delicate blush and white and more to the midsummer wife who wears a much more practical green.
Whenever the weather and responsibilities would permit, I would secret a book out the front door to perch on the shaded stoop, reading until my legs fell asleep from the pressure of the unforgiving seat. I’d shift, watch the freckled cherry blossoms shiver under a slight gust, and then dive back into my fictional world. Honeybees and distant lawn mowers formed a perfect droning background allowing me to hear and notice nothing but my story.
I loved stories before I learned to love words. Grandma called me and my sister Missi “long bookers” because from the moment we could read for ourselves we were devouring any books we could get our hands on. We voraciously read library books alongside the volumes that Dad had saved from his childhood subscription to the weekly readers club, Mom’s childhood favorites by Marguerite Henry like Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind, and a collection of stories and poems stunningly illustrated by Garth Williams called The Tall Book of Make-Believe.
Around the time we moved to Reston, a life-changing gift from a woman at church shifted my reading from indiscriminate selections of whatever was available to a guided tour of children’s classics. In the church parking lot, weighed down by a heavy cardboard box, she stopped us before we climbed into the Station Wagon. “You girls like to read, right?” We nodded enthusiastically. “Then I’d like you to have these.” She handed over the complete collection of the double-sided Companion Library series. “They belonged to my daughter who’s headed off to college and doesn’t want them anymore.”
Suddenly we were rich. We owned The Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, Hans Brinker, Heidi, The Five Little Peppers, Alice in Wonderland, Arabian Nights, Aesop’s Fables, Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Black Beauty, The Call of the Wild, The Prince and the Pauper, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Little Men and many more titles.
This incredible wealth was ours—unexpectedly, unbelievably ours. The tales were wonderful, and the layout of the books only enhanced the wonder. What novelty and pleasure there was in coming to the end of one story, flipping the book, and finding another! Ensconced in the Lazy Boy in the living room, piled under the covers of my bed, or perched on the front stoop, I read and reread these volumes over the next few years, losing myself in the pleasures of story and unknowingly preparing to find myself through the beauty of words.
Retreating into a book meant enveloping myself in an expansive solitude. It was a rich mantle difficult to lay aside especially when doing so always brought pain.
After each book, pleasure abruptly shifted to confusion and guilt as I contemplated a dreaded task. For each book read we had to complete a book review to be given to our parents. I doubt they were intended for this purpose, but each book review inevitably left me ashamed. After providing a brief plot summary, we answered questions like, “Was reading this book the best use of your time?” This one was a killer. How could Nancy Drew or The Littles Give a Party or even Little Women rise to the level of the best use of my time? I could have been helping Mom, I recognized. Or I could have been reading the Bible. Given those alternatives, no book ever passed the “best use of my time” test.
Then came “Would you be able to recommend this book to a friend?” By the time I arrived here, I already knew I was wrong to have read the book myself, so how could I recommend that a friend sin as well by doing the same? I don’t remember what my actual answers were. I was always torn between protecting a beloved pastime and following my conscience by saying I shouldn’t have read the book and couldn’t recommend it. I was plagued by fear that all reading for pleasure would be banned if I spoke the truth.
Inspired by authors I loved, I began to write as well. One attempt was a spectacular failure, the other a resounding success.
In a thick, spiral-bound notebook with pages in pink, purple, green, and blue, I started to record anecdotes and adventures from our family—all the funny stories, silly mistakes, amusing misunderstandings that I could recall. I intended the book as a gift to all of our children in the future, so I wrote it referring to my siblings as “your aunt Lydia” or “your uncle Eric.”
One evening as I rummaged through my bedside shelf for the notebook, planning to record a few more diverting tales, Missi solemnly informed me that she had not approved of my project. She thought it was inappropriate to record our mistakes and foibles, so she had taken it upon herself to destroy the book.
Stunned, I didn’t know how to respond. Her disapproval weighed heavily on me, but I had sincerely believed my project was pure. By contrast, it did seem very wrong to destroy my work without my knowledge or permission. Yet, I reflected, reading never seemed wrong while I was doing it either; it only became wrong under the harsh light of book reports.
I wish I could say I started over, but I didn’t. It was now a project of dubious morality and I had lost the heart.
On a crisp and sundrenched fall afternoon when the leaves were at their peak color, Mom encouraged me to write a poem about the beautiful autumn day, and I carried my paper and pencil to the front stoop in search of inspiration. The cherry tree cloaked in red and gold did not disappoint.
As I attempted to capture the glory of fall, or at least the intimate beauty of my small slice of fall as seen from the front steps, I became suddenly became aware of words—their sounds and shapes, their cadence and rhythm, their syllables and substance. I’d always loved the idea of homonyms from the moment I’d learned about them, but until now that had been the extent of my conscious joy in words themselves.
Now, as with my music, I intended to evoke a response; poised between a painted cherry tree, pale and subdued, and a living cherry tree, vibrant and extravagant, I was once again at the intersection of representation and reality. Words fluttered onto my page as the leaves tumbled from the tree—tremulous and tentative yet joyous.
I don’t know that the poem itself was particularly memorable, but the experience of writing it was a revelation from which I have yet to recover.
Rachel Brown
enjoys sipping tea, savoring good books, and spending time outside.
She is daily inspired to live more deeply and love more fully by her husband and two children.
One Response
What a beautiful story of this experience through the lens of a both a child’s view and a recollection from an adult’ lived experience. The descriptions of your inner world and the profound innocence of your first crush smelling like maple syrup bring just bring your words to life. I’m inspired to seek out nature in the same reverence today and can’t help but be so grateful I found your writing. I’m looking forward to reading more delicious narratives of what your passion and imagination bring. Thanks for sharing.