Somewhere in Atlanta

By Lisa B. LaLonde Dec. 3, 1996

"Somewhere in Atlanta, there's a tree that's as old as I am."

This Thought crossed my mind the way thoughts intervene and cut each other off. Like losing your way because of an unexpected road sign, or perhaps more like being cut off by a rabid taxi. I was flying to Grandma Min's funeral, and all thoughts had been on her, the preciousness of time spent with her and the ensuing friendship between a 95-year-old and a 30-year-old, recalling the pain of her youthful losses, the tranquillity and torment of her last years.....and suddenly we were flying into Atlanta, just a stopover, and The Thought reverberated as if a bird fluttering around inside the plane, diverting me from grief to another path:

Somewhere in Atlanta, there's a tree that's as old as I am.

The Thought followed its natural trail back to the house on Weigelia Road, "Wiggly Road" as Grandtoppy always called it. A suburban part of Atlanta, I was always flown then driven there and would have no orientation to find it as an adult now. I can still smell the pine trees in the backyard as I woke up with the windows open and can still see the old brick wall of the back porch with its many airy holes where birds and squirrels came to dance with Grandtoppy. I can even feel the linoleum kitchen floors and find my fingers itching to jump into the ever-present jigsaw puzzle on the dining room table. Like it was yesterday I can see us all standing giggling in the car-port on Christmas Eve, newly arrived from New York as a surprise, and the look on Grandmary's face as she opened the door to what she thought were just local carolers. All these details are so real, so I find it odd that I can't recall much about the tree that is as old as I am.

It was a dogwood tree that they planted in the front yard when I was born, so, like me, surviving nine months in the womb, it must have been a seedling already having survived the initial bursting forth of life. I remember it was small, you could hardly call it a tree for many years, just like you could hardly call me a woman yet. I don't recall if, when the blossoms finally burst forth sometime in my teen years, they were pink or white. It seems important to me now, almost like needing to know its personality after all this time. I have never been any good at identifying trees or bushes or flowers, but perhaps because this tree and I shared common ground, I know a dogwood. It is my only acquaintance with a tree and my ancestors would proudly say it is the "Southern" showing up in me.

Today the house is sold, my grandfather dead 19 years, my Grandmary dead this spring, and my Grandma Min, a whole different memory trail, dead only a day. The intersecting paths of my heritage were crossing and mixing as we took off from Atlanta and I looked down at the foreign landscape again. Crossing and mixing like my heritage did to produce me, I reminded myself. So it was somewhat comforting in light of the newest

loss to me, to have The Thought cross my mind on the way to remember another life. To know that somewhere in Atlanta, the tree is there. Maybe someday when my body is fragile and my mind feels its age and craves physical connections with the past, I will come from whatever distance to find "Wiggly Road" and look for my twin. I trust, as I trust that each day God will design the fabric of my day to get me through it with grace and purpose, that today's owners of the tree and tomorrow's inheritors will not cut it down. How I will feel the solidity of time and family if I get there and that one thing remains, the tree that will always be as old as I am.

©1996 Lisa LaLonde