Every Tree is a Mother, Every Mother a Tree by M Jaimie Zuckerman

When I think of my mother, when I try to see her in my mind, I can only see her hands. Though they must have been beautiful once, in my memory, her hands are gnarled roots.

They’re calloused and yellowed by tobacco, scarred by wood and roses and cooking knives and carelessness. She’s the kind of person to cut herself and plunge forward anyway, her bloodied finger streaking the pie dough or clotting with dirt when she pulls weeds with the same fierce tenderness with which she mothers. She doesn’t use a spade or fork to pull the weeds—she uses her hands. 

My mother is alive. I don’t need to rely on my memory to see her. But I don’t see her as often as I wish I did. She lives in the woods and is afraid of leaving, so she cannot come visit me. To visit her, I rearrange work to have a few days off and drive three hours across New England. Each visit is never enough. Never enough time for conversation to unspool until it settles to silence while she knits and I read a book. Never enough to memorize her face changing into that of an old woman. 

She doesn’t have a cell phone, so we don’t text stray thoughts to be present in each other’s lives in that distant-but-close way of phones. When I call, I know the phone with the long cord rings in the kitchen. I know she’s hurrying down the hall in her way that isn’t any faster, just louder. Most of her walking is actually stomping. As I listen to the ring, I can hear her thundering over old oak floorboards. 

Talking to her on the phone—out of the context of the whole life she’s built around her like a nest—her voice is grating and harsh. I get frustrated and easily annoyed. I’m not patient enough when she says something terrible. I’m more childish and emotional than I am in my own life where I go through the comfortable daily motions of work and wife. Sometimes she says something kind about my life or the woman I’ve become, and I’m surprised and don’t know how to react. She usually claims credit for anything I do, as if I’m not separate from her, an adult woman of my own making—not because I’m not, but because I’ve always been defined as her child. Talking to her on the phone is not the same as being with her in real life. In real life, her voice is spidery and forgiving, and I’m a better daughter. I don’t even particularly want to talk to her. The way I miss her is physical. I want to sit next to her soft body, I want to be held, I want to watch her busy hands.

She’s always had this habit of tapping the tip of each finger to the pad of her thumb—index, middle, ring, pinky—and then working back—pinky, ring, middle, index—and then back again and again, her fingers moving like wooden hammers inside a piano over a very simple tune. 

In my neighborhood, there’s a pond, the jewel in Frederick Law Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace, and along the pond there’s a particular tree. Everybody who’s lived here a while knows which tree I’m talking about. It’s the ancient birch that crooks a branch down to the water, bending just above the surface like an elbow joint, an arm reaching to the water that mirrors the sky or is bright when autumn leaves dreamcoat the surface. In shops on Centre St, local artists sell homemade postcards with photos of the branch. 

The branch is a measure of the water level, which changes more drastically with drought and deluge than it used to. But the branch remains steady, even as the neighborhood that holds the pond that holds the tree has changed so much. Yuppies have started buying up the neighborhood, getting a doodle, staying for five to seven years or until they’re pregnant with their second child and move to the suburbs where the schools are better. Those of us who’ve held on and stuck it out are the ones who share the elbow tree.

The neighborhood is big enough that we don’t really know each other, and the pond is small enough that only people in the neighborhood use it. I recognize certain strangers: the Rastafarian who paints portraits, the woman who sits on a bench playing a full-sized harp to the Canada geese, the old man who practices tai chi in the boat house, the runner with beautiful tattoos. 

There’s a way in which places you pass daily—witnessing the small changes of light and time—come to hold significance that’s hard to articulate. With the elbow tree, the meaning is both singular and private—something only I and the tree experienced together—and shared—a neighborhood of strangers having their own meanings and moments with the same exact tree. Among those who circle the pond regularly, each of us, strangers in a city, has a relationship with the elbow tree.

Maybe I want to be next to my mother, not connected by the wires and signals of phones, to be in the same room as her, because I’m forty now and can remember her at this age. My early memories are bright, fragmented and sharp like a broken window. Around when I was ten and she was forty, my memories of her begin to clear, to be windows into her and not just broken glass. She never learned to drive a car. She collected bird houses. She hated Ronald Reagan and Andy Rooney and my really Christian classmate’s mom. She hated crowds and cocktail parties or anywhere she had to make small talk. She ate the same sandwich every single day for lunch: roast beef, tomato, melted muenster cheese on oatmeal bread. She was not a patient woman. She was so much herself, and I was just starting to form an identity of my own. 

Nobody’s opinions are as strong as my mother’s, so she’s a difficult person to be around when you’re trying to become yourself. In retrospect, my process of making myself wasn’t as self-aware or deliberate as that of my peers or the students I’ve watched as a teacher—it was accidental and clumsy. My first opinions were vague and mostly mirrored my mother’s. And god, I talked to my mother so much in those years. I joined her daily walks up the hill with the dogs, and I talked and talked about school and the kids in my class and what was confusing and what it would be like when I got my period and what I thought was love or what I thought was pretty or sad. I talked while she chopped tomatoes from the garden. I squeezed in the bed between her quilting hoop and my father’s ass while Tom Brokaw was on TV and when I tried to talk or ask a question during the news, she shushed me. When I had trouble sleeping, she got me to run my fingers through her hair which felt good. It’s supposed to be the mother who runs her fingers through the daughter’s hair, but my mother was tired of mothering and has always acted like a little girl. So I wondered aloud, and she muttered mm-hmm as my fingers gently combed her hair.

I am now the same age she was then. One night, I got in a horrible fight with my husband and wanted to be with my mom so I got in the car and drove three hours and the light outside the kitchen door was lit and the windows shone in the cold and dark, and when I went inside, the kitchen was warm and the dishwasher rocked and wooshooshed and my mom stomped down the stairs and enveloped me in one of her hugs that have just gotten better with age because she’s worn and softened like the leather of a familiar shoe. 

In some ways, all the times I’ve passed the elbow tree—each with its unique light and weather and feeling—layer over each other like leaves becoming duff becoming forest floor. The moments make a whole. I particularly love the tree in the fog when its form is essential, the only gravity and weight in a whited-out world.

Whenever I wake up to a dense morning fog, which happens a few times a year, and I don’t have anywhere I need to be early, I treat it like a good thunder storm or a song I love coming on, which is to say it’s an occasion to savor. I walk to the pond before the fog can lift. 

In the fog, the pond becomes strange, hushed and alone, the rest of the world muted. The sun dims to a dull nickel, and the autumn leaves brighten against the milky white as if their color were a light they’d stored up. A cormorant spreads its wings out to dry and the fog turns its black silhouette to a sentinel, a harbinger, a shroud. Spiderwebs, always there but never visible, become apparent with fog stringing droplets on every filament. I wonder why there are only spider webs on one side of the pond, and then the question passes into the morning murk. Fog so dense and a pond so still make me wonder about my life and if I’m living it well. 

On one of these fog walks, I stopped to watch a great blue heron stalking the water around the elbow tree’s branch. The water doubled the heron’s dark shape. It lifted a leg. Paused. Placed the leg without a ripple. Paused. Lifted the other leg. Paused. And its mirror image copied the pattern. I waited. The heron’s neck darted into the water and came back dripping and empty. It flapped onto the crook of tree’s branch and stared into the water’s impassive glass. Still. Alert. Finally, its beak dove again into the water, this time coming out with a flapping fish. The heron pointed its beak to the sky and jerked the fish down its too slender throat. I was close enough to see the gold of its eye, the only color in sight, before the bird lifted its broad wings and rose across the pond. 

I called my mother to tell her about the heron. Her voice was still thick with sleep. 

“It’s a sign.” 

“No, it’s not, Ma. It’s just beautiful.” 

She reminded me of the time she went to visit a great blue heron every day. She didn’t need to remind me of it—it’s why I’d called to tell her about this particular heron. She repeated the story anyway.

The year she visited the heron daily was when I was thirteen and my classmates bullied me so relentlessly, I didn’t see the point of living if I had to go to school with them another year. (I forget if I admitted that aloud to her—I told her everything but I might have understood how much it would hurt her and kept my first secret from her.) Each day had some fresh cruelty I recounted on the walks up and down the hill. The pain doubled, seeing its impact on my mother. I remember when she called the parents of the girl who led much of the abuse, her disbelief and rage that they didn’t care. It was the first time I’d seen my mother so powerless. We waited to hear if I’d be accepted to a private school my parents couldn’t afford. For some reason our daily ritual of walking up and down the hill with the dogs came to include separating for ten or fifteen minutes at the top of the hill. I climbed a big tree in the center of a fallow field while my mother continued to the fire pond flooded by beavers where the heron lived. There, we’d be alone with our thoughts and sadness for a while, and when I saw her coming back along the road, I climbed out of the tree, and we walked home together like we always did. My mother’s belief system is some cross between hand-me-down Protestantism, animism, and pop feminism. She’d once heard Madonna said that if you want something badly enough, the whole world will conspire to help you get it. By this logic, my mother asked the heron to help me. She did this faithfully every day. And when the whole world conspired to get me into the private school, she thanked the heron. 

After that, every great blue heron was a totem linked to me. Even after I moved three hours away to a big city with a career and husband and didn’t call or visit often enough, whenever she saw a great blue heron, it was a connection to her daughter. 

My mother reminds me of all of this and I interrupt saying, “I know. That’s why I called in the first place.” Like my mother, I am not a patient woman. I tell her about augers in ancient Rome, who were responsible for interpreting the signs and movements of birds, auspices, to determine the future. People came to them with requests, and the auspices would urge caution or cause hope. For thousands of years, people living in an uncertain world have asked birds for reassurance. And we make it through our catastrophes of heartbreak and hope more or less intact.

“You see? It’s a sign,” my mother insists.

“Can’t things just be beautiful? Isn’t that meaning enough?” 

“It’s both beautiful and a sign.”

“A sign of what?” I demand. 

When I think of my mother, I can only see her hands. In the last decade or so, she’s started growing one thumbnail into a yellow talon she uses “a weapon” or an all-purpose tool to scrape clean or lever open stubbornly stuck materials.

When I think of my mother, I see her hands.

Her hands embroidering the edges of each piece of a quilt, her stitches leaving a white trail, an imperfect logic, over the colorful fabrics I’d cut out. It took her six months to embroider a quilt, working on it every night during Tom Brokaw. She drank instant coffee, only at night, to stay awake and quilt or read a murder mystery in the sleeping house. 

Her hands digging in the dirt, dark half-moons of soil forever under her nails. 

Her hands rolling out pie dough. 

Her hand holding my hand. 

Her hand touching thumb pad to fingertip again and again.

Her hands slicing celery for tuna salad. 

Her hands weaving cane chairs. Her hands weaving baskets. Her hands hooking a rug or needlepointing roses and rich cornucopia. She always worked by eye, without a pattern. 

Her hands washing her hair over the kitchen sink. 

Her hands pulling weeds from between her perennials. 

Her hands striking a match from the free matchbooks given out at the IGA, lighting a cigarette, and placing the matchbook on the table. 

She taught herself everything. And all of it—the quilts, the gardens, the rugs, baskets, chair seats, the pies, tomato sauce, and stew—I can now recognize what I didn’t then—how skillfully done all of it was. How I envy her skill.  

Now my mother has rheumatoid arthritis, the result of repeated cases of Lyme disease. Large knobs on her knuckles make her even witchier than she already was. She refuses to take the medicine they gave her because it made her tongue numb the one time she tried it. So she says. Not a believer in modern medicine, my mother occasionally takes Tylenol for the pain, but that’s it. Like her Madonna mantra, she believes she can master RA with pure willpower and turmeric. Sometimes, her medicine fails and she can’t use her hands at all and she has to get my dad to open jar lids. 

Her gardens have become even more unruly and fallen into disrepair. The bird houses have rotted and fallen from their fence. She knits sweaters more than making quilts. She won’t say it’s because it’s easier on her hands, but I know. She still drinks instant coffee at 9 PM to stay awake for the quiet hours. I can almost see her. Knitting in the gold frame of the window. She stops to smoke a cigarette and her fingers tap thumb tab to tip, over and over.

I am the age now she was when she visited the heron daily. I look like my sister who looks exactly like my mother did then, but I look nothing like my mother. With a mix of hurt and pride, I see traces of her in me—I hate crowds and small talk, I can’t hide an opinion to save my life—curses she probably placed on me. Like my mother, like my thirteen-year-old self, I never quite fit in. It’s more difficult to be like this living in a city than it was for her in the woods. I work with people and their feelings and words, not with dough or thread or roses. My hands are smooth. My hands open doors, operate a cell phone, and drive a car. My hands type pages and pages on a laptop. There’s a distance between me and the work my hands make. When she was my age, my mother knew herself so definitively, but I’m in a constant state of becoming, walking around a pond made invisible by fog. I miss my mother, want to be beside her body watching her busy hands work, because I crave such certainty, certainty of what you’ve made with your life. Pie crust. Roses. A quilt. A daughter. What is lost by distance? When we can’t touch what we’ve made or what has made us? 

That time I impulsively drove across the state to be near her and came into the kitchen with the dishwasher and the light and she hugged me, she didn’t say anything or ask anything, she just let me be there next to her while her knuckled and aching fingers knit me a sweater for Christmas. Sometimes, I find a single strand of her hair tangled in the fibers of the finished sweater, and I don’t pull it out. I leave it in so I can find it again and again. 

Because the elbow tree belongs to everyone and no one, we’ve all watched with sorrow as it loses more of itself in successive storms. There are so many more storms now. First, it lost great branches, then a big part of its massive trunk split off, almost in half, the wood so raw it looked like exposed muscle; you could almost see the flow of sugars and water through its fibers. Then it lost more. Finally, all that was left was the great base of the trunk and the elbow branch. It was a real-life Giving Tree, reduced as we watched, if the storms and climate change were the selfish boy. 

Because they share nutrients and because so much of their bodies are underground in the roots, trees die slowly. Even when a sudden catastrophe like a storm fells a tree and we would think it’s dead, there’s miraculously another year of life, and another. This spring, again, the elbow branch has put forth tentative leaves on its sole remaining branch bending over the water. 

But recently, a vertical crack has reached down the shorn trunk toward the roots, a certain death sentence. 

And then something special happened, a better ending to The Giving Tree. Somebody pinned two small field notebooks, golf pencils, and a ruler to the trunk. They set up a little chart in the first pages so that passersby could note the date and measurement of the crack. But after those first two pages filled with dates and measurements, the pages instead filled with notes to the tree, telling the tree it will be missed, thanking it for its beauty and grace, expressing a kind of love that is rare in a city where everybody is busy. The different handwritings of strangers:

Happy anniversary my love! We met here one year ago (and one day) A ♡ C

I like to measure the height of the water with this loving tree. Is the water up today? –Kim 

This tree means so much to me. I always think “the lovers” as I see it reach gently for its pond. 

Thank you tree for always reaching out no matter the weather I will miss you when you go.

I have different fotos in my phone of this tree different times of year. Be w. energy, kiddos, don’t try & always capture it.

It’s incredible, right? That something like this can still happen. Despite it all. For now, the branch still reaches out, reflected in the stillness of our pond, but we know it doesn’t have much longer. 

The notebooks on the tree are yellow, bright in the fog or damp in the rain. Hanging from the trunk, they’re a reminder every time I pass to stop and notice. Small pages splayed and ruffled by the wind, marking time. How much time is left. Fingers tapping out the time.   

M Jaime Zuckerman is the co-translator of My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and author of two chapbooks. Her essays and poems appear in House Guest, Grist, Fairy Tale Review, Hunger Mountain, Palette, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of a 2020 St. Botolph Society Emerging Artist award. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA.

27 March 2025