The Oak They Tried To Claim

I was sixty-two years old the afternoon a woman I had never met stood on my grass in high heels and ordered me to move my own truck off my own land. She said it that plainly, the way you would tell a waiter to refill your water. She did not ask. She did not introduce herself first. She lifted one finger toward my old pickup parked under the shade of the oak my family has owned for six generations, and she told me it was ruining her sightlines.

I have been told a lot of things in my life. I have been told the rain would hold off when it did not. I have been told the price of hay would come down when it climbed. But I had never, not once, been told to move my truck off the ground my great-great-grandfather cleared with a mule and a hand plow. So I did the only thing a reasonable man can do when a stranger tells him to leave his own property. I took off my cap, wiped my forehead, and asked her to say that again real slow so I could make sure I heard it right.

The tree my grandfather taught me to love

You have to understand the tree first, because the tree is the whole thing. Everything that happened, happened because of that tree.

It sits on a low rise at the front of our place, the first thing you see when you turn off the county road. It is a white oak, and the county forester who came out one spring told me it is somewhere north of two hundred years old, which means it was already a good-sized tree when my family first walked this ground. The trunk is wide enough that my two grandsons cannot reach around it with their arms joined. In summer it throws a circle of shade you could park three trucks under. In fall the leaves go the color of a copper kettle, and the whole rise seems to glow at sundown like the tree is holding onto the last of the light on purpose.

My grandfather used to take me out to that tree on Sunday afternoons when I was small enough to ride on his shoulders. He would sit on the fat root that humps up out of the ground on the east side, the one that has been worn smooth by a hundred years of people sitting on it, and he would tell me who was buried in the little family plot behind it, and what they had done, and why the fence line ran where it ran. He told me his own grandfather had left the tree standing when he cleared the field around it, because a man had cut a switch from a tree once and whipped him as a boy, and he swore that when he owned his own land he would leave the biggest tree on it alone forever, out of spite and out of respect both. That is the reason the oak is still there. Spite and respect. I have found that most things worth keeping come down to some measure of those two.

When my grandfather passed, my father took me to the tree. When my father passed, I took my own children. It is where we scattered my mother, and where I intend to be scattered, and where my kids know to bring their kids. It is not a landmark. It is not a photo opportunity. It is the oldest living member of my family, and I mean that as plainly as a man can mean anything.

So you can maybe start to understand what it did to me to come up over the rise one September afternoon and find a hundred white folding chairs lined up under it in neat little rows, like teeth.