Our theme for the month of February is “plants.”
Memories—like the neurons that convey them, like trees that can inspire them—are dendritic. One spurs another and another in unique, chaotic, branching patterns. At least, that’s how I picture it.
A beautiful mountain ash tree in my childhood backyard was the perfect shape for climbing, given the reach of my childhood limbs. Perched on the brow of the gentle slope down to the wooden fence (where I once fell out of a wagon, necessitating stitches across my own brow), it was the site of hours of whimsical fun. Its stout, sturdy trunk gave way, just a few feet off the ground, to a snarled array of stocky branches suggesting an infinity of paths to explore. It was a vantage point from which to survey the tennis courts in the neighborhood park below, and the treacherously steep incline of Turtle Hill to the left—the most harrowingly perfect sledding hill.
My elementary school’s administration took a stonier view of perfect climbing trees. They had the lower branches of the campus trees unceremoniously lopped off to discourage risky behavior. The intended discouragement failed spectacularly, of course. The sappy limbless stubs were trickier (and therefore much more fun) hand- and foot-holds, and tree-climbing gained instant celebrity recreation status.
Each of those shorn poplars may well have been genetically identical, but those of us in the serious tree-climbing business knew that didn’t mean squat. Their branching patterns were unique: the churchward one was scraggly and leaned alarmingly, while the most schoolward one would support you higher up than the others (though the first holds were more of a reach). In reminiscence, I pulled up the Google street view of that line of trees and was astonished at how very flimsy each of them looks, two decades later. How could they ever have seemed so sturdy and safe? With adult eyes, I finally understand the fear that surely inspired the shearing, but I still don’t appreciate the result.
We had a similarly frowned-upon wintertime game that seemed to us the most practical solution to recess in weather that was just a smidge less frigid than the cutoff for indoor leisure (twenty below, Celsius). The game was slightly more imaginative than the name (clog the slide), and it went like this: the first kid (preferably the one with the warmest winter gear) went down the slide, anchored his or her boots in the gravel, and braced for impact. Then everyone else tumbled down the slide, filling it to the brim with scrunched-up bodies, stifled laughter, and delicious warmth. The school was not fond of this game, and it was swiftly banned when one boy’s ear tore against the unforgiving yellow plastic as the clog slid down one kid-length.
That ban’s main effect was to spawn clog the slide 2.0, in which the first kid simply anchored her or his boots and back against the slide’s slick interior, some two feet before its terminus so that (provided the light was right) the slide would appear innocently empty. My memory is hazy on just how well (or—more likely—poorly) this worked out, but I think I recall the game ending only when the bottom of the slide gave out, leaving it looking like a cannoli with a bite out of one end.
Memory lane is a meandering one, it seems. That strikes me as fitting, though—fitting as the perfect climbing tree to a child’s limbs. What else should we expect from ephemera housed in dendritic tangles?
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
