most-alone-tree

Most-Alone Tree

When my mind wanders through the hills and vales of memory, I almost always end up in a place. It’s not so much the people I remember as the place…the way the August night smelled of dry grass and withered roses; the way the fog boiled and churned behind the hills; the spot the dust collected under the kitchen table; the sound the wind made in the willowy pine outside the bedroom window.

I think we can know a place better than a person. People dodge and defend, are mercurial and complicated, often confusing. Places mostly just want to be known and remembered.

Take this tree on a road called Boughton Hill in the countryside heading out of Honeoye Falls. The road rises, twists and turns through fields of corn and wheat and hay. Suddenly, you crest a hill and there it is: a lone tree in the middle of an empty field with nothing in the air but sky.

In the long-ago days, my father drove out Boughton Hill every morning very early when the rabbits sat under the soaked wildflowers and munched crabgrass, when the sun was thin and tentative, the air full of birdsong and mist. I wonder what he might have been thinking, listening to Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard sing about broken love, as he made his way to the hard job of making roads like Boughton Hill through the fields of other counties.

In the long-ago days, I kissed a boy in his pick-up truck, parked one summer night on a lonely road off Boughton Hill. I remember the fragrance of the earth cooling and the corn breathing and the night settling in. I remember the wild chorus of crickets down in the ditches, the sound of my heart in my ears.  But I didn’t know much about the boy except that I liked him and wonder now if he was wondering what he was doing there with me. Maybe he was thinking about his truck or his shop class or the tv show he was missing or how to get the kiss right.

And now, when we go back home to visit, we exit the Thruway and travel Boughton Hill again. There are more houses, often quite unattractive and glaringly new, standing cold and stark on an acre of rider-mower lawn. My eye looks away, searching for the old houses with their weathered clapboards or chipped shingles. Usually there is a protective cluster of trees around the back door, a falling-down barn just steps away, a bit of rusty detritus in the side yard. They have their own private poetry, these lived-in, fading places half returned to the earth.

The memories fly up to meet me as we make our way on Boughton Hill, back through the years to the little town that was once the world. And in some ways, still is…a town still beckoning, still breathing, still begging to be known. Quite a place.