We planted it in memory of him, because sometimes you plant a tree when words aren’t quite enough, when you need something living to carry a name forward. When my father-in-law died in 2007, one of my wife’s friends gave us a crepe myrtle tree and we planted it right by the garage so we could see it each time we came home.
In 2013 we lost our house in an explosion and had to move. We dug up the tree and took it with us in a big pot. It did not do well, but we couldn’t let it go. When were able to rebuild and move back home, we planted the tree again, but it did what grief does. It went quiet. No leaves, no color, nothing but bare wood standing against the brick like it had given up. We said our goodbyes to it and mourned again.
Then came Easter Sunday.
Of all mornings, Easter, we walked out and saw buds. Small, stubborn, impossible buds, pushing out of wood we’d already decided was dead. It hadn’t died. It had just gone through something we couldn’t see, underground, in the dark, on its own timeline.
That tree has been blooming pink against that brick wall for over 10 years now, exactly the way we hoped it would when we first put it in the ground. And this year, we noticed something else: a second tree, small and green, growing up right alongside it. Nobody planted that one. It came from the first, from roots that went deeper than we knew, still doing their quiet work underground, still producing life we didn’t ask for and didn’t expect.
That’s what a legacy looks like. It’s not just the thing we planted on purpose. It’s the next thing that grows up beside it years later, unplanned, because what we planted took root deeper than we could see.
Leave a Reply