Moving to our new home in Reston, Virginia ushered in an era of uniformity, of sameness.

Chantilly had offered abundant variety. Each tree had dispensed shade crafted from shafts of sunlight as they sliced through its specific pattern of branches, its uniquely shaped and hued leaves. Each had offered its own forms of undergrowth, its own bark—smooth or rough, thickly layered or thin and string-like, home to lichens or pocked by woodpeckers. Each tree and patch of flowers was unique and known and loved. Each had breathed beauty and truth into my world. All would be missed.

Everyone in the family deeply felt the loss in our own ways. My two-year-old brother Elias wanted to go back to our home in Chantilly and burn it down so that no one else could have it if we couldn’t live there anymore. I chuckled mournfully as he repeated this wish over many months. My methods would have been different, but I understood the sentiment.

Reston’s fenced in backyard, a half-acre lot of oak trees, greeted us with a homogenous mass of brown leaves—a far cry from the redbud’s welcome a few years earlier. The lowest branches of the oaks, who had raced each other towards sunlight, were far out of reach; the great era of climbing trees—for perspective and solitude, for rest and companionship—had come to an abrupt end.

When we first arrived, the yard was entirely covered in leaves, a springy bronze-brown carpet. Thick, musty scents, earthy and dark hung heavy in the air and clung in nostrils unused to decay. Hesitant feet began to explore paths yet unmade, with an ear to the music of the leaves, the shuffle, rustle, whisper, swish, crinkle, crunch, hush.

Soon, we organized. Armed with rakes, Missi, Eric, and I created and maintained a giant, looping, interlocking set of paths, perfect for games of tag and serviceable for the occasional ill-advised game of blind-man’s buff. As we removed many years’ accumulation, we uncovered the secrets of the rich soil underneath. The crisp exterior concealed a world, soft and alive, though perhaps in ways unsightly or unseen.

Under layers of decay achieved by bacteria, invisible but industrious, we discovered great white grubs with red eyes, complacent and unconcerned when hoisted on a rake for examination. Quick, responsive roly-polys, turning in on themselves at the slightest provocation, jointed exoskeleton suggesting impenetrability while, in reality, the tiny bug could be crushed quite by accident and quite unbeknownst to the crusher. I found myself more akin to the roly-polys than the grubs.

Once, while raking, Missi upset a nest of yellowjackets and was routed with many a sting. I remember being awed by her bravery in just shrugging off the stings as Mom soothed her arms with the pink, strong-smelling Caladryl lotion. I wasn’t confident I would be able to do the same and avoided that area assiduously.

Our time in Reston was the golden age of time with Dad.

He taught us—the oldest two or three children—to play Monopoly and, over root beer floats one New Year’s Eve, he and Mom introduced Missi and I to Rook, a card game with a long lore in our family.

My grandmother’s family, Baptists from northern Minnesota, had made Rook an exception to the usual rule of no card games, feeling justified because this game used a deck unlike regular playing cards. However, when caught in the midst of a Rook game by a surprise visit from their minister, the evidence was dashed undercover before he was invited into the parlor.

But in their haste, they had missed a card. The littlest in the family, my great aunt Caryl, noticed the offending card just in time and, not wanting to attract attention, simply placed her small foot over the card. She remained rooted to the spot until the minister went on his way. We do love our Rook.

Dad worked patiently with us as we completed our first 3-D puzzle, a replica of Neuschwanstein Castle. (I felt my mother was quite a woman of the world when she recounted her college choir tour of Germany’s cathedrals and castles, including this one.)

Dad told the boys rollicking bedtime stories about a mischievous dog and his hapless owner while Missi and I read until the last possible second in our adjoining room, often pulled out of our novels to chuckle along with the hilarity overflowing next door.

Weekends often included bike rides or walks with Dad, and always ended in our tradition of Sunday ice cream served around the dining room table.

But Dad’s crowning achievement was building a log cabin in the center of our oak trees.

This was a dream come true for children raised on The Little House series and Caddie Woodlawn. Saturdays and summer evenings, Dad and the older kids worked together to fell, measure, cut, and construct with great piles of honey-colored sawdust underfoot, in our hair, and flecking Dad’s Saturday stubble. We cherished every sweaty, gnat-plagued minute. We felt like Real Pioneers.™

I wonder now, as he felled his first oak in our backyard, if it brought back memories of the last oak tree he had chopped down many years before, and I am grateful that he labored to make this time a treasured memory for us all.

Dad used wooden pegs to secure the logs as we built up, and even added a front porch as well as a second story porch from which the younger children were banned. I wanted to add chinking as I’d read about in many stories, but I don’t believe that ever happened. A favorite memory from the construction of the cabin was being selected to hand Dad shingles as he staple-gunned them to the roof trusses. The task was simple and repetitive, but I felt so honored to be chosen. I loved feeling useful and I loved being near him when he was working with wood—he was so much more relaxed and relational.

Life in Reston took on a predictable rhythm surrounded by these towering oaks. The school room, the kitchen, and the basement playroom looked out on the back yard, so almost every memory is captured in a frame of living oak.

We would get up at 5:45 for Wisdom Search (Bible study to the layman) with my dad before he left for work. Breakfast followed, sometimes scrambled eggs and toast, often pancakes; these came with an exciting bonus. Missi would make tiny, thin silver dollar pancakes and Eric, Lydia, and I would compete in pancake wars to see who could eat the most. I usually won. It felt silly even then, but it was fun.

After breakfast came chores—dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, bathrooms. That last was my job, and I cycled between the bathrooms of the house, cleaning one each day, working until it passed even my mom’s eagle-eyed inspections.

Then Mom would lead an hour or two of Bible study pulled from Wisdom Booklets, published by a leader my parents respected and followed closely, before we began working on our regular school subjects like English, math, and history.

Lunch and its accompanying dishes followed. Missi prepared the meal; I cleaned up after it. Then, until 3:30, we tackled any school that hadn’t gotten done before lunch and pursued the more fun subjects like piano or creative writing. We were done with school at 3:30 and free until dinner, an occasion that my younger brother celebrated with the exclamation “Joyful hearts!”

Oh, the wild, sprawling freedom between 3:30 and 6:30! Anything could happen! What did happen, whenever the weather was nice, was hours of playing outside.

Our wooden swing set, hauled from Texas in our last move, didn’t make this one. It was replaced by a wobbly metal swing set kit, better than nothing but not the same. But it hardly mattered.

First, the previous tenants had left a rusting green jungle gym behind, and each afternoon it variously transformed into a wigwam, longhouse, teepee, igloo, or cave as circumstances dictated. Second, we had the cabin. Fantasies became reality buoyed by the cabin and a chest of dress up clothes whose contents ranged from printed prairie dresses to tasseled leather vests to silks fit for royalty.

Often our neighbor, Holly Singh, would join the games. Holly was beautiful and dark, quiet and kind, lovely and generous, creative and funny. Long, thick braids hung well past her waist. She had pet rabbits in hutches that stood against our shared fence which was the pretext we used to first get to know her. She seemed to be an only child but had several adult siblings. We all adored her, but I counted myself particularly lucky that she was my age and my especial friend.

Living off the land, we ground acorn coffee, baked acorn bread, simmered acorn stew. We primarily played that we were early American colonists, Missi always proclaiming she would have run away to join the Indians if she had been forced to live that kind of life confined to corsets and cooking. She needed freedom. We sometimes divided ourselves between royalty and servants in a palace drama a little out of place in our cabin, but both games—settlers and servants—provided simple natural storylines so it was easy to include the little ones to the best of their ability, a very useful trait as we whiled away years of afternoons under the oaks.

While the afternoon oaks appeared friendly, the oaks were menacing at night. Many evenings I would stare them down with narrowed, angry, hopeless eyes. Yet the oaks in the darkening sky appeared lofty and impervious even as my stomach turned and my hands clenched.

In a system of spiritual gifts expounded by the leader my parents looked up to, I was pegged as a mercy. While being a mercy had some positive traits such as loyalty, I was warned against many things intrinsic to my nature.

Everything in me lives to protect the vulnerable and support the weak, connect with the isolated and restore the lost to community. A harsh, unfeeling word; a correction of behavior without inquiring into its source; a conversation at cross purposes, these wound me deeply whether directed towards me or to those I love.

This tended to mean that when I observed something in our family culture or rules that seemed to me harmful or wrong, allowance with a tinge of humorous indulgence was made for my feelings, but my perspective was invariably shrugged off because I was a mercy; it was simply a matter of course that I would feel too deeply someone else’s hurts.

And so it was that, palms clenched in fierce opposition to the oaks, I counted spankings administered with a wooden spoon one room away. Hearing the rising cries, I dug my nails deeper, helpless and confused. It is true that my siblings knew the spankings were coming. It is true that they could have avoided them if they had obeyed quickly, cheerfully, and fully. But despite that simple arithmetic and without the vocabulary to explain why, I believed that something was not right.

There had to be a better way. One that built relationship not shame, one that relied on something other than pain.

But when your theology hinges on escaping the torments of hell, when sinners are held by an angry god, when he who loves his son spares not the rod, there is no other way. And this, the only way, is labeled as love and meant in love.

I believe I understand now that this is fear masquerading as love. It is fear that believes it is love.

But perfect love casts out fear.

It is only when I have misunderstood the heart of God that I fear for my children and suddenly feel compelled to strike when I have been commanded to speak.

As yet though I had no voice and no words, only sorrow cloaked in outrage.

The oaks, monolithic now in the gathering night, stared back unmoved. Yet every morning they greeted me afresh, warm and welcoming once again.