When I was a little boy, I saw heaven as some sort of ever-present eutopia, that if you could reach it, you could get in. I believed that Heaven existed between the sky and space. We, heh, we used to have these big oak trees in our back yard, that, well from my point of view, seemed to go on forever.
I didn't have all that many friends at school. Where I grew up, sports were everything. You see, there wasn't a whole lot to do but to go to the local High School and Middle School sports games. We lived way out in Kansas, so you know, what else was there to do?
Me, well, I didn't have friends, and I couldn't play sports. My parents always tried to get me to try out for some of the little league teams, but I refused. When I refused...
...well, that's when my dad got mad. When my dad got mad, he yelled at my mother for raising our son like a girl. It didn't matter if she apologized, because he would hit her anyway. I witnessed this for the first time when I was about 7, I'd say. He had a pillowcase wrapped around his fists so he could show her the blood afterwards.
At that age, I still believed in that kind of Heaven you could touch. And that's when the oak trees would come into my life. Whenever my Dad would begin to yell at my Mom, I would go outside and climb the tallest oak tree, the one I couldn't see the top of. When I got tired, I would sit on the branch I was at and look at how far up I was. Each day I would climb a bit higher.
At 10, I reached the top. At the top, I looked down. I was about 200 feet above my house. I still can't put my finger on it, but I began to cry. And not a normal cry. This was a full on sob. Tears poured down my face and melted on the shingles of my house. I stood up on this branch and stretched my arms out as far as they would go and sobbed.
This was it. This was as far as I would get. And I was so close.
I went back to my old house when I was 30 with my kids. I sat on the old bench in the backyard, moss growing on it like an infection. Nobody had lived here for years. As I sat there, I looked for the old oak, and when I spotted it, I could hardly recognize it. It was doubled over my house, it's branches brushing against the roof, almost clawing at it.
It's leaves had all died many years before, and all it wanted was this house. The place I had tried to escape so many years ago, it was trying to save. I remembered my Father's last words. "Son, in this life, the way you turn out is decided by the house you live in". That Tree had shown me the reality of life and death, the sorrow and pain of life, and had I never experienced what I did in that house, I would have never even given that tree a passing glance.
My kids ran back to me with my wife. They saw what I was staring at. "Daddy?" the youngest one said, "What's wrong with that tree?"
"That tree," I replied, "just needs to rest, and he deserves every last second of it."
The end
