I want to climb this tree. This tree sits in the middle of the quiet (for now) loop in which Blanche, Betty, Sam, and I are parked for several days on the northern fringe of the Texas Hill Country. I am once again in a place dear to me. It’s hot as Hell and I am loving every second of it.
When I was a child, up until the age of 15, I loved to climb trees. Live oaks have a way of growing low and long in the Texas heat and that makes them especially conducive to being climbed by little-girl feet. I spent many hours in the trees on the acreage near my home on the north side of Houston. I don’t recall ever slipping or scraping or otherwise making an error. I was fearless.
In my teens, I was a sort of athlete (although I hated sports) and often joined my father in the den in the evenings by jumping over the back of the couch and folding my legs into lotus position to come to a seat in one smooth motion. Dad would shake his head with the slightest glance away from his television show, and say something like, “there’s my little monkey.”
How absurdly simple and easy life was! How privileged I was! Women like me, raised in comfort and ease but perhaps now feeling the weight of change and age, forget sometimes just how easy the last fifty years were for most upper-middle-class, white kids.
In 1980, my family moved to the Upper Texas coast, away from climbable trees and empty pasture land. The Galveston Bay area was vastly different from the north-side farmlands both in terms of geography and diversity.
I loved the Bay but until this moment, at 58 years old, seeing this tree, I didn’t realize I’d lost both a skill and a source of joy.
Each week, it seems I discover something I have lost in my adult years; some piece of myself or some memory I had set aside to get through the next day, the next stressor, the next argument.
Each week, it seems I discover some new wound I must heal. These wounds can be attributed to one or the other or both of my marriages or the rigors of adulthood in general. Sometimes, they can be attributed to my failures that had little or nothing to do with anyone else.
I was too busy in Surfside to make these discoveries.
When I was living in Surfside Beach Village, I walked regularly and worked on the beach a number of hours a week. I was in some of the best shape of my adult life. I have allowed the travel, loneliness, and deep dive into my past to weaken and soften me.
I look at people I see in the parks and many are like me: flabby, making do with their aging bodies, and not pushing their limits. Like me, most are hiding from the reality of life in the US while they are here. It’s a luxury the parks afford for these hours of isolation.*
Now and then, however, I meet older couples who kayak together or hike or swim enthusiastically. I am envious. They motivate each other.
No one is here to motivate me.
I want to climb that tree.
What I realized tonight, as I wandered the somewhat austere beauty in the location of my favorite childhood memory, Lake Whitney, Texas, was that I can rekindle my energy and I can, despite my age, train my body to climb trees or kayak just as I trained it to lug heavy buckets of trash, hop the mile of granite on the Surfside Beach revetment, drive a truck towing 3000 lbs of trailer, back that sucker up!, and delve ruthlessly into my history without leaving this earth for good (so far).
Training myself to be motivated without someone to encourage me, without a reason to do these things, is another matter. I feel, especially after recent SCOTUS decisions, little reason to do much of anything. If I am, according to five so-called justices, the second-class citizen my marriage taught me that I was and of no value other than as an incubator (I’m well past that capability) or a hausfrau, then what purpose is there in finding joy in my physical health and well-being?
What point is there in climbing trees? So far, the only point seems to be to risk slipping and scraping; something I suppose I must do in the long run if I am to recall how to climb.
Tonight I put bare feet on that tree trunk to test myself. No, not yet. I’m not yet ready to climb.
*I have yet to process SCOTUS’s decision or the Uvalde tragedy fully.
Last Updated on February 26, 2023 by Lee Ellis
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