OAK TREES, AZALES BUSHES...AND FERN. Pts. 1-2

We moved into our current home in the late ‘80’s, and though the house had, by then, been built for less than a decade, and everything was “ship shape” and in good working order, I noted one exception. The backyard wooden fence appeared older than the house, and the posts and panels had begun to rot. As a result, and within a few short years, I took the fence down, and never bothered to replace it.

And it so happened that my neighbor, Mrs. U., had either planted, or had spontaneously generated, as the case may be, a border of common fern which ran along her side of the fence line. Well, as you might imagine, once I removed the fence, the fern “developed a mind of its own,” and began to spread.

Does the implication of rabbits or bacteria mean anything to you? Whereas, my lovely, little third of an acre had previously been populated by twenty-seven scrub oak trees, and nine pink and white azalea bushes, given the passage of (remarkably little) time, literally thousands of garden variety fern peeked up out of the soil, and quickly grew to a uniform height of 2-3 feet.

In the past couple of weeks, I plugged in a hard drive, and clicked on an old home video. My father, mother, wife and I, my brothers, my sister, my children and their children are involved in a backyard activity. A BBQ. The date imprinted on the lower right of the screen, 12-30-91. And it is immediately apparent that though the characters in the home movie appear to be moving, and breathing and talking, there can be little doubt, it is a moment forever frozen in time.

My parent’s retirement party

Pt. 2

And as I am once again provided the opportunity to invade the privacy of this group of ten or twelve persons, who are as near and dear to me as my own flesh, (and they are my flesh) two things, in particular, are all too obvious.

Not only are the ten or twelve members of my family, and their families, a full quarter century younger than now, and the twenty seven scrub oak trees shorter, and nine pink and white azalea bushes smaller than now, but the third of an acre which I claim as my own is, in this frozen moment, absolutely bereft of the fern which has long since populated it.

And it occurs to me.

As surely as the green undergrowth has spread like a proverbial amoeba and covered the once bare ground which existed at that idyllic time and place, just as surely has the passage of time altered the proverbial landscape of those who once gathered to celebrate one of the three or four most common festivities which any family affords their patriarch and matriarch.

For you see, in the course of a year, one of the participants of that backyard celebration, my oldest daughter, began to display the symptoms of Schizophrenia, and was committed to a long-term mental institution.

And strange indeed, that twenty years to the day after the imprint date on the video, my father suffered a major stroke, and was admitted to the hospital. In the space of three months, he went on to his reward.

And four years later, my mother joined her dear husband, and that innumerable throng which had preceded the both of them. Each had walked their own “lonesome mile” during the respective month of their birth, each were weeks away from the second half of the eighth decade of their lives, and a scant ten days separated the length of days each were afforded to live on this good earth. (My mother, it might be said, “won by a neck.”)

Afterward

The landscape we call “life” has been as inextricably altered, for me and mine, as has been my lovely, little third of an acre of oak trees and azalea bushes.

I have replaced my father as the aging patriarch of a nuclear family to which my own sons and daughters were once concepted and derived their names. And I stand on the very threshold of that same poignant celebration to which I once afforded my own parents; in a familiar place that has, with the passing of time, become gradually unfamiliar.

Oak trees, azalea bushes

…and fern.

by William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from (Mc)Donald's Daily Diary, Vol. 58. Copyright Pending.

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