Adoration: The Maple
Our family was young, the house old, the backyard scorched and empty. We were broke from the down-payment, the legal fees, but we wanted beauty. We found a sugar maple left over from last year, marked down. A crew from the plant nursery chopped through the still-frozen ground and we packed the hole around the unremarkable stick with peat and compost. Every week, generous water. That tree was faith rewarded, impossibly soft green of buds in spring, then prevailing through heat and drought and snow and the occasional ice storm.
Each year I added to the garden, cedars along the fence line, raspberries and currants, plants that thrived in the shade of the maple -- mayapple and foam flower. Our son brought home from school a seed in a box that grew into a handsome spruce in the back corner. In April the earth is naked, but soon comes the miracle of June, the colour and texture and scent of new growth, the maple keys spinning.
An underground stream, buried but not forgotten, runs under this winding street. The roots of the tree find it in year seven. Such joy shoots through its veins that it grows nearly a metre that year, up to the bedroom windows. The water, ancient and unstoppable, powers its growth to above the roof of the house. Each fall, its leaves are fire in the sunlight, orange and gold tinging the upper rooms of the old house with warmth.
The sweetness under its bark is briefly ours. Tapped in February, it yields bounty in spring sunshine. We boil the clear liquid in the kitchen, releasing a scent of maple, straw-like and tangy. A group of our neighbours do the same. There is a final boil-down in the park, unexpected community when the air is still cool, the syrup we all share dark and rich.
In the pandemic year, the tree is shelter and blessing. Its branches shade the patio, where we sit outside comfortably despite summer’s heat. In rain, it acts as an umbrella. When lockdown kept us home, it defined an outdoor room where we could sit at distance with our now-grown children and salve our loneliness. On this small city lot, sandwiched between house and garage, swathed in polluted city air, that tree continues to do God’s work in the world.
Just think what a million million such trees, soaking up carbon, pumping out oxygen, could do.
