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| The white pine above my three hives |
A youngster born
near the border between eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, I imagined all the
world resembled mine—green mountains, far as my eyes could see.
Within these mountains lay flatlands
Appalachians named “bottoms”. My folks called our home the McCoy Bottom, and
our farmhouse the “homeplace”.
My mother’s grandfather, Lark McCoy, had cleared
the bottom’s timber for crops and built his homeplace, barn, smokehouse, henhouse,
two cabins, and beehives.
Mom’s father Floyd, however, had built his
homeplace with a Sears kit on the opposite end of the McCoy Bottom. The roads
being too narrow, Sears delivered the shipment via Peter Creek.
A tributary formed by the runoff of rain flowing
down mountain hollows, Peter Creek divides the bottom. My grandfather tended his
honeybees along his side of the creek, and grew corn on a hillside on the other
until his untimely death.
From my earliest memories, Mom would point
to the hill where young trees grew and say sadly, “That’s where Dad planted
corn.”
My grandfather also grew green apple trees
along the path between his homeplace and my great-grandfather’s. The barn with
bats in the haymow faced the orchard from the other side of the lane.
Just when I learned to find toeholds in
their gnarly trunks, Mom and Dad packed up our household and drove away. The
mountains slowly shrunk into flat cornfields that endured throughout the
eternal state named Ohio.
After Dad crossed another river and drove
into Detroit, I couldn’t believe the straight, paved streets lined with houses
and driveways far as my eyes could see. Then he turned his car into one of
those driveways and unloaded the trunk.
Feeling sorely homesick for the bosoms of
my green mountains, I found consolation sitting under the shade of the one tree
in our front yard. Impossibly huge to climb, however.
One school day I cried again to stay
home. Mom said, “Iris, you have to go to
school. You won’t pass to first grade if you miss much more.”
I walked down the porch steps to the tree and
sat beneath it facing the street, out of Mom’s sight from inside the house. I
fell asleep and awoke to find bird droppings on my head. Mom led me to the
bathroom and scrubbed and rinsed my hair and scalp in angry justification of
delivering my discipline.
To my mother’s dismay, the incident
encouraged me all the more to climb and sit beneath trees.
The other day when I failed to spy the
queens in my three hives, I laid down under a pine to stretch my back and put
life in perspective.
My goodness, dear Reader! I wish you
could’ve seen what I saw. Under the clear, blue sky and sparkling boughs of the
white pine, and the sound of bees restoring order in their home, their queens didn’t
matter.
The cool, green grass upon my neck, my
Lord whispered, “I will never leave or forsake you.”
All the trees of the world are His.
