Maple Tree Memories

Today I spent the morning pulling weeds in my front yard. With the Florida sun beating down on me and sweat dripping down my back, I smiled as I thought of the maple trees. Some of my fondest memories are of those times when I was a little girl, pulling up maple trees with my daddy.

Our house had three big old Norway maples on the property. One stood in front of the house providing shade on hot summer days, and the other two formed a room of sorts at the end of the backyard. They were beautiful trees. The shade they created was lovely, but grass would not grow under their branches. Instead of having a front lawn, we had a bed of ivy interspersed with wild flowers collected from the woods. I remember the trillium with its three petals smiling above three pointed leaves, the mayapple, whose flower hid shyly beneath two green umbrellas, and the jack-in-the-pulpit with its spadix standing inside a hooded cup. It was an intriguing plant. I could see how a person might imagine the structure to hold a little man, but my daddy was a preacher, and he never stood in a pulpit that looked like that. My favorite flower that grew in the front yard was the lily-of-the-valley. The dainty white bells would bloom in the spring, lined up on a stem just a few inches tall. And oh, what a fragrance they had! Sometimes I would pick a little bouquet for my mom and put it in a tiny vase to bring the scent indoors. And then there were the maple trees.

You see, as nice as those majestic shade trees were, they had a nasty habit of bearing seeds that insisted on sprouting and growing babies. Helicopters, we called the double samaras that twirled like propellers as they fell to the ground. Sometimes I would take one of the seeds, open it up, and put it on my nose. The sticky substance inside was made just for this purpose, and I would pretend to be an old witch, or Jimmy Durante, whose trademark schnoz made him famous. The maple trees produced millions of seeds, it seemed, and every one of them turned into a little tree. We couldn’t just mow them down, since they were growing among the ivy and wildflowers, so they had to be pulled up by the roots. My daddy would patiently remove them, one by one. He showed me how to identify the pesky plants and demonstrated the way to get the roots by pulling them from the base of the stem. We would remove the weeds and talk, as robins sang above us and the smell of fresh soil filled my nose.

The two giant maples in our backyard grew next to each other so that, together, they shaded a large area that we used in the summer as an outdoor room. The branches formed a canopy so dense that we could sit under them when it was sprinkling and not get wet. We kids would play games under the maple trees and camp out at night in our sleeping bags. Sometimes we would have picnics there or lift rocks to see what kinds of bugs were hiding in the soft humus. And on hot summer days, my daddy often sat reading in a lawn chair as a gentle breeze rustled the leaves and I picked raspberries nearby.

When autumn came, the leaves of the maples turned a beautiful golden yellow that lit up the neighborhood like sunshine. As the weeks progressed, the leaves turned orange and brown and began to fall, and soon we were crunching on them as we walked to school. Raking the leaves was great fun. We would make huge piles of them and, like children always do, get a running start and jump into the mound, laughing. There was nothing quite like the smell of those autumn leaves. That woodsy aroma had a way of conjuring thoughts of football games and apple cider, and reminding us that soon it would be Thanksgiving. And then would come Christmas ─ and snow!

The maple trees looked naked in the winter, standing there in the cold with their bare branches showing. The sun would sometimes peek through the overcast sky, trying to keep them warm, but they always looked a little sad, I thought. Unless it would snow. There was something magical about the snow. It always seemed to start at night while I was lying in my bed. Out there in the silence, the world was being transformed. I heard the sound of a car spinning its wheels as it tried to go up the hill in front of my house, and I knew that it was snowing. A quick peek out the window confirmed my suspicions, and I drifted off to sleep hoping that school would be cancelled the next day. When morning arrived, I threw open the curtains to behold the glorious sight. The ground was covered with a perfect layer of snow, marred only by a few tiny footprints from a bird who braved the winter weather instead of heading south. And each branch of the maple trees had a soft white blanket that glittered in the sun. Sometimes the snow would begin to melt, but then it would get cold again and icicles would form, decorating the maples with sparkling jewels.

Eventually the weather began to get warmer, and the maple trees stoically stood their ground through wind and rain. Then one day, as the sun shone brightly, little buds began to swell and then open. Tiny green flowers and shiny new leaves appeared, and before we knew it, the trees were clothed in majesty again. The robins returned from their winter vacations, built new nests, and filled them with pretty blue eggs. Soon there would be babies in those nests, mouths open, waiting for juicy worms for breakfast. The wildflowers would begin to bloom. Lawn chairs would be brought out for the summer. And my daddy and I would pull maple trees.