Whenever I think of trees, the first one that comes to mind is the tulip tree from the back yard of the house where I grew up, on Stevens Street.  The tulips were all near the top, so that in the summer the tree was a slim green goddess wearing a tiara of flowers shining whitely in the sun.  

“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” people remark to me when I reminisce about this tree, a comment that always makes me feel special , somehow, that I got to grow up playing under that tree- its spreading branches provided excellent shade – not knowing how unusual it was, just liking it the way kids do.

That house had lots of good trees around it – especially the big old elms that had to be cut down when they got Dutch Elm disease.  Whenever I draw a house with a tree (which is fairly often, with the little one), I always draw one of these elms, their straight proud trunks, the messy green halo indicating the leaves.  In its full glorious maturity the elm is s a tree among trees, stalwart and tall. 

One of my earliest memories is refusing to walk down the sidewalk past the elm that grew near the driveway. It was a windy day and the branches were tossing wildly; I became convinced the tree would fall on me.  My mom tried to persuade me that she’d keep me safe but I knew if the tree could crush me it could crush her too, and I cried and tried to pull her back into the house in such terror that she relented and let me stay home from school that day.

The next day she said today I was going to school no matter what and I shrugged. I hadn’t forgotten my fear, but it was a calm day and the tree was still, and no longer seemed dangerous. Made sense to me, at the time. Still does.

There was the Russian olive in the corner of the backyard with its silvery grey-green leaves that rippled in the breeze and made the whole tree seem to shimmer. There was the  tree by the back porch, where dad put the glider and then swore about the bird poop stains all summer.

There was the pin oak that sat at the end of the driveway, friendly and ordinary, always seeming to say, welcome back!

The poplars in the backyard that formed a tall green fence that swayed gracefully at its tippy top.  Those trees always looked like sisters to me, five teen-aged girls that tossed their hair, pretty and independent but in unmistakable solidarity against whatever might come.

I remember coming home from college one summer to find my dad standing in front of them with his arms folded, contemplating.  I’m thinking of cutting them down, he told me, then looked surprised when I demanded to know, Why?!  

Oh, they’re just …old-fashioned, he said vaguely, and I was indignant at this flimsy reason that seemed no more logical than mom wanting to replace the couch because she was tired of looking at it – a couch that sat in the pristine silence of the living room where no one ever sat, back in the day when even a poor family like ours kept one room full of uncomfortable, ‘for good’ furniture, for company that rarely came.

 He did cut them down, so now they sway only in my memory, tall against a robin's egg sky, their little roundish leaves making their joyous applause sound in the light breeze just like they used to.

Then there was the octopus tree up the street, at the corner of Stevens and Foster. It had this fantastic network of branches that made it look, well, like an octopus. It begged you to climb it, and a kid or two could usually be found in its midst.  I remember getting really high one day, so high I couldn’t hear what Lisa and Mark were saying to each other way down there on the ground. A branch gave an ominous crack and I accepted the tree’s gruff warning and climbed down.

Not far from the octopus tree was a spreading pine, remarkable because it ws the only pine in the neighborhood but also  for the small clubhouse that an older neighborhood boy built near the trunk.  It is perhaps this memory that has always made pine trees seem so secretive to me, even their scent is something I associate with close quarters and nervous whispers.  The view of them crowded silent and sentient on the ridges of the mountain as I drift past them on the ski lift has not altered this sense a bit.  

In Stephen King’s novel The Tommyknockers, the character Jim Gardner (Gard) is nearly killed when he skies into a big old hoary pine. He ruminates on the fact that people are always idealizing trees as benevolent and benign presences, a view he does not share.  “Some trees will kill you, if they can,” went his thinking, a sentiment Dorothy no doubt adopted during her trip through the malevolent forests of apple-throwing trees, toward Oz.

Then there was the tree in the movie Poltergeist, the one that tried to devour the little boy. Not a favorite tree, but certainly a memorable one: the boy is frightened of the storm that is muttering outside his window, and the way the lightning silhouettes an old tree so that it looks like a snarling, demonic face.  His dad tells him with typical clueless parental indulgence that it’s just a storm, see, and if you count the seconds between the thunder and the lightning, you’ll see that it’s longer and longer between flashes, that means the storm is going away.

So the dad leaves the room and the boy starts counting and the flashes of lightning stabbing earth get closer and closer together,  until they are just seconds apart and then kablam! the tree outside the window is struck, and big limbs crash through the window and seize him in his bed, pulling him into the maw of its trunk and  chewing with this awful roaring sound.  The boy’s sister is no help, of course, because she is hanging on for dear life as a heavy wind attempts to pull her into the closet which has becoming a gaping mouth that leads directly to hell. 

Yep, that’s a memorable tree.

The plum tree I can see from my home office window is a friendly little workhorse of a tree, every year producing a freight of small tasty plums that drop onto our deck.

The peach tree in my backyard in Houston enjoyed a few brief days of delicately scented, blooming glory every year before the grackles descended and picked it clean, then sat around in the branches like a crowd of old men in identical black overcoats, fat and unsatisfied, scolding us in their rusty voices.

The dogwood in the front yard in St. Louis had an unhappy, twisted shape, a shape that always made me think of Edgar Allen Poe stories, of some doomed soul looking up, crouched,  his gnarled arms above his head in a fearful, warding off gesture.  Then spring would explode all over the tree, a glorious profusion of pink that made you forget the 355 days of unsettling ugliness.

The magnolia tree outside my husband’s house is growing in one of those square plots of grass right in the sidewalk.  The flowers always look so fake to me, like something in a cheesy floral centerpiece you’d get on sale at Michael’s.  But I love the broad waxy always-green leaves, the kind of leaf that Thumbelina would surely choose to shelter under.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the little tree that stood at the back of my yard in Austin. It had feathery fronds for leaves, and flowers comprised entirely of delicate pink filaments. It had an Asian look to it, but I never learned its name.  It stood at the exact center of the yard, perfectly bisecting the long wooden fence that bordered the property, and there was a Zen like quality to the picture it made when I looked out my kitchen window and saw it dimly haloed by a nearby streetlight.   The tree died from lack of water, the same year my marriage died, possibly for the same reason.   

The tree outside my bedroom in Austin was unremarkable except for a branch that rubbed up against the house, right next to the master bathroom window. A mourning dove would perch on that branch and when my then-husband was away on another endless business trip I would lay alone in the bedroom - which was south-facing and always dark -  listening for what seemed like hours to its sad lament.

Giant eucalyptus trees stand in a mighty row on a side street near my house in the city.  In a neighborhood that contains Victorian houses, a bed and breakfast, a liquor store, a restaurant and a parking garage, they are a stern reminder of the fleeting nature of the changes we humans have wrought on the northern California landscape. We have always been here, they seem to say, with a touch of warning.

They are benevolent for now, scenting the air with their spicy, somehow calming scent.  I often park my car here, beneath their enormous branches that spread across the street in a dense canopy; I know the sticky resinous leaves will drop thickly on my hood but I don’t mind.  I feel safe among them, even – maybe especially – when it is late at night, as if I am guarded by Tolkien’s great, watchful Ents.

Then there is the weeping willow, a tree I hope to have near me someday, a tree that always makes me go dreamy sad and thoughtful.  I feel a mysterious connection to that tree, something akin to recognition, but not for any reason I know or understand. It just is, like the tree itself.  Which is a good enough reason to want to be near it, I think.