catalpa
Remember when at the beginning of the summer I basically wrote an entire blog post about how I was mourning leaving my favorite tree in our backyard when we moved? You may remember it specifically as the moment you thought, “Wow. Christina is actually kind of insane.”
Well, I still think about how I miss watching the sun set over my little Catalpa in the evenings and all it represented in my life… beauty even in hard seasons. Grief is tricky and it surfaces in creeping, mercurial ways, surprising me with the way it can commandeer seemingly inane moments. Sometimes the longing for things that are gone feels so heavy on my tender heart that it takes my breath away.
A few days ago, I was having one of those moments, letting a few tears fall into the soapy water as I did the dishes after breakfast. Overwhelmed at the idea of starting over in a new place, I let myself indulge in a few minutes of keeping company with the sadness.
When I looked up from the pile of dishes, my eye caught on something out the window. Something about the crooked, winding limbs of the tree outside was so familiar.
It’s a Catalpa tree.
A massive, expansive Catalpa, spreading over my next door neighbor’s front yard. I didn’t recognize it at first because it didn’t look like the one I had known, which was young and sprightly and had clearly never had a limb removed or had to patiently grow around another tree invading its personal space.
But this tree that sits outside my kitchen window? It’s seen some stuff. Its trunk is split with a long gash where maybe it tried to grow a little too fast in its 20s. One side is kind of flat, where a branch must have been trimmed decades ago, although there’s not so much as a scar there now. Its huge limbs tower above the house, desperately reaching for sunlight as the trees around it do the same, a neck-and-neck race that’s lasted maybe the better part of a century. It’s my tree all grown up. It’s so beautiful.
Compared to this majestic tree, the Catalpa in my old back yard looks like a twig, a sapling. It was familiar to me, and that’s what made me love it. I didn’t love it because it was beautiful, although it was in its own way. I loved it because it was known to me. I liked looking out and seeing it change its clothes through the seasons and grow a little each year alongside my babies. It was familiar, and my ache has been, distinctly, for the familiar.
Peering out my new kitchen window, in my new home, trying for a new way of being who I’m meant to be, part of me would rather see that silly little tree just for the comfort of it. But God isn’t working in my heart with comfort. Right now, he’s working in my heart through sadness and courage and always, always, always hope. I look out wanting more of the same, just for a moment, to make me feel better. But where I look for small, he gives me big. He shows me how stunningly beautiful scars and knots and missing limbs can be. More beautiful than I could have imagined when I thought my own spindly tree was as good as it could get.
Anyway. They’re just trees. A pretty tree, then an even more beautiful tree. But they matter to me. In a way that goes beyond metaphor or spiritually cute symbol. In a way that sits staunchly outside my house, holding physical space for hope and joy and life, until I’ve cried all my tears into the sink and am ready to run out and claim it.
And seeing those big, heart-shaped leaves dancing in the light of a pink sunrise reminds me that those days are coming, are indeed within reach, and always have been.