Tree Hugger
by Mary Ellen Gambutti
Christmas in Tokyo, 1962, Dad packed his Air Force blue B-4 bag for temporary duty in the Philippines. Three days later, my Swedish classmate, Ingrid, whose diplomat family lived near our city school, visited me to lunch and play in our military dependent community. Bored with dolls, we donned jackets, and went out into the crisp air.
In the gnarled embrace of a crabapple out our kitchen door that summer, I had lounged and read. A tall girl, I could easily grasp a low branch, lift my long legs up and over a limb, and hoist into the friendly shaded comfort of the fruit tree.
Below a grassy slope, I rambled and dreamed among tall trees. In this sacred space among arboreal spirits, adjacent to a high-banked stone wall that undulated at the edge of Meiji Shrine, I was a woodland child; a hugger of trees on the firm earth that hugs and supports kindred species. I relished warm bark, familiar feel of leaf and twig, and the shelter of a cathedral canopy.
Our Washington Heights houses were built in 1949 on Imperial parade grounds. Japanese gardeners-guards maintained these manicured groves that spilled over the wall from the forest planted in Emperor Meiji’s honor.
Ingrid warned me not to—she, the wiser and worldlier of us eleven year olds--but a leaning black pine dared me dash up its slanted profile, like a playground slide. Once up, I must lower myself ten feet with no assistance from side branches, while my worried friend attended below. A quick reversal, a twist, drop; my left ankle wrenched.
He heard my piercing cries, and a khaki-garbed caretaker trotted toward us. Concerned and consoling, he radioed “help” to military police. Ingrid spoke perfect Japanese, and pointed up the
steep lawn toward my house. The gentle man hoisted me to his back, and slung me over his diminutive frame. I wailed in agony. My long legs dangled, my broken ankle hung. He lugged me; a gangly, pigtailed American girl, up the slope, and across our kitchen threshold. Mom pointed to a chair and chided me for putting the kind man out of his way. I moaned and thrashed while we waited for the ambulance. Ingrid--responsible and mature--summarized the accident to Mom, departed down the hill, along the stone wall to the main gate, where she hailed a taxi home.
Three weeks after Christmas, Dad was home, and I was back in school with crutches. Five weeks from my fall, I graduated to a rubber-heeled cast, ready to play kickball, and a full eight weeks after, I was released of my burden.
I recall the insult of a second ankle turn the following summer; the painful reminder my healing was not complete, when Ingrid and I played catch in her driveway. Her blue eyes widened, and her empathetic gasp revealed her dread of another emergency in my company.
Mary Ellen writes about her life as an Air Force daughter, search and reunion with her birth family, her gardening career, and her survival of a stroke at mid-life. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gravel Magazine, Wildflower Muse, The Remembered Arts Journal, The Vignette Review, Modern Creative Life, Halcyon Days, The Book Ends Review, Nature Writing, Haibun Today, PostCard Shorts, Memoir Magazine, Borrowed Solace, Thousand and One Stories, StoryLand Literary Review, CarpeArte and SoftCartel. Her memoir chapbook is 'Stroke Story, My Journey There and Back." She and her husband live in Sarasota, Florida, with their rescued Chihuahua, Max.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete