Poems by Christine Webster-Hansen

Light Green Hue

by Christine Webster-Hansen

From Canary Summer 2021

Cornfields, orchards, and strawberry farms surround Christine's home near a horse ranch and local vineyard with red grapes ripening in the sun. Enjoying the four seasons, she tends her rose bushes and azaleas, awaiting the anticipated first blooms of her cherry blossom sapling.

A cluster of silver maples towered beyond my fenced yard. Rising above the spruces, their trunks stretched 80 feet, memorializing the cleared members of a forgotten brigade. Deciduous soldiers, they stood, unpruned, unplanted by human hands. Having once breathed en masse with a thousand others, they splayed roots beneath the ground, lightning bolts in still-frames. They comprised a lone slice of woods in my neighbor’s yard, perhaps where the developers thought they’d cleared enough trees to make a sale, but their disarray made them appear unowned. The trees encroached upon my property, dropping leaves amid the pinecones and needles, and reemerging as smaller, unequally spaced trees. My family avoided this zone, cutting the grass until its edge, the wildness claiming the territory beyond it through silent treaty. Nearby, an oak towered thirty feet above our roof. We wrapped our deck around its six-foot trunk with a staircase spiraling to a balcony. A massive canopy, the oak tree’s branches extended the width of our home like an umbrella.

As a child, I sat with these trees in quiet contemplation, revering their fearsome quality. By six a.m., the trees were talking. I would crawl out from the bottom bunk, careful not to snag my hair, and brush aside the curtains. A voiceless conversation began. I could discern when the trees were happy, sprouting beautiful, shapely hands. On nice days, I sat on my swing-set, goosebumps rising, the wind lifting strands of my hair and tossing them in a hundred directions—the trees’ way of shaking hands. There was a faithfulness in their permanence, and I liked that if I forgot about them for a day, they were still there, shaking the way jolly old men held their stomachs. The trees understood me, nodding from time to time as their limbs dipped and danced, whispering secrets. I felt unjudged.

I loved when the storms blew in because the trees became a crazed orchestra, screaming their silent soprano. The leaves would turn upward, showing the light-green color of their undersides, exposing a part of their essence that I didn’t normally see. I knew the trees were frightened, and I was afraid with them. I watched in awe as they whipped and battled angry winds, their arms falling off and landing on the lawn.

Eventually I took to cycling. I liked going to Rancocas Woods, where the trees hung over the streets in arches. Standing up while pedaling, I ran mid-air while listening to the wind in my ears. The only other noises were the breaking of twigs under wheels and the rotation of chains as they clicked past objects that made whooshing sounds.

Finally, I became old enough to drive, so I renounced my bike. During this time, I didn’t notice that the oak tree was dying, that its branches were falling in agonized chunks on our roof, or that the black ants had been eating its insides. Its flat, cookie-cutter hands now grew on only one side. I’d ignored it for years, so our friendship had slowly died. My mother called a tree removal company.

The tree came down in sections as I watched quietly. I looked up and saw the other trees waving their branches like sad, old friends. I could feel the spirit of the oak in its light green hue hang immobile in the air. When the crane lifted the widest section of trunk, my jaw dropped—it was hollow. I had wanted to save a sliver to hang in my room, preserved and glossed, but there was nothing to preserve.

The trunk left a four-foot pile of diseased black dust, and emptiness filled the spiral staircase, which now gaped like unfinished architecture. Alone, I sat outside, listening for the rustle of leaves and appreciating the unkempt trees. Beneath me, the oak tree’s roots remained. Unseen, their length marked the years of my childhood, extending beyond my birth to prior generations. Embraced by a quiet breeze, I inhaled and exhaled amid the maples and spruce, ageless and symbiotic with my surroundings. Then I smiled, noticing acorns lying in the crabgrass and plantain, brown-roofed cupules strewn haphazardly amid helicopter seeds. Some were buried slightly, their tops appearing as tiny umbrellas, just above the earth.