Under The Giant Hackberry Tree

The smell of snuffed candles. An organ postlude wafts through wooden church doors out over just-fallen snow. Under a giant hackberry tree, a lamb, someone’s tiny pony, hay bales, Mother and Child. Across the street, Charlie Boyd’s tinsel and lights, so garish by day, look just about perfect shrouded by snow. It is Christmas Eve 1976, and all of this happened in the one hour we were inside, as if on cue.

Celtis occidentalis, the common Hackberry, gets little respect. Its jagged tooth-edged leaves. Its tart mealy berries. Its lack of a colorful native name. Its wanton indiscretion about where it chooses to thrive.

Harbinger of nipple gall, powdery mildew, witch’s broom, jumping plant lice and a host of grisly arboreal ailments.

When horticulturalists grasp to sing its praise, its corky ridged and warty bark is what they settle on.

This unsung, wanton tree just happens to be the tree that marks the seasons of my life.

That simple living nativity under the hackberry’s winter bare branches, and the sudden magic of new fallen snow, is my first real memory of Christmas.

Decades later, its jagged irregular ovalish leaves provided May-perfect dappled sunlight for my sister’s wedding.

In high school, under a pelting February rain, a few days after a car full of classmates had careened down a steep ravine, Mr. Harding and Reverend Kimmel gently snaked the line of overflow mourners out from the hackberry’s inadequate shelter and into the breezeway, while more folding chairs were brought for them to the sanctuary. For the first time that I remember, that big yellow room did not seem sunny.

During Holy Week, a rough wooden cross is erected beneath its bud swollen branches, a cross that will be draped with a black cloth on Friday before we deck it with hyacinths and daffodils on Easter.

A silent presence through so many seasons of my life, I have always felt a certain kinship with this hackberry, perhaps because it bears a small bronze plaque declaring it the tallest tree of its kind in 1971, the year of my birth.

Tall Tree Winner, 1971

In the late seventies the hackberry was struck by lightening. Severely pruned in the aftermath, and rigged with wires, it has flourished in the decades I have been away.

For several years, when I would trek back to my old hometown and revisit haunts and dip my toes in the Cuyahoga’s waters, I would inevitably make my way the few blocks from the river to the public square that Judge Josiah Stow dedicated in 1830 for the free expression of divine worship. Ours was not to be a town dominated by a single spire, but in the square, a plot for the Methodist Society, a plot for the Episcopalians, and a plot for the Campbellites; on the green, a place for the Congregationalists; and just above the sublime ferny sandstone grottoes of the Glens, a church for the Catholics.

Disciples of Christ Church, Church Square, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

On my return visits, suddenly this tree, this silent, nondescript backdrop to my formative years, loomed large.

I began to notice it: I loved the shadow dance of floodlit branches on the building’s façade on a windy October night. Of a summer Sunday morning, I loved how its canopy of small jagged leaves dappled the eastern sun. The hackberry’s shade is not the gloom of a big leafed maple, or the solid cover of a mighty oak, but something enlivening and brisk and animated, a canopy that mottles but does not smother the sunlight.

I’ve never known the grace of elm trees, or the majesty of our native chestnuts, now vanished from the American landscape. This sturdy common hackberry is what I have to mark the decades of my life.

I love that any day now this sturdy survivor just might overtake the spire of the big church that was erected behind it. The old architect’s rendering of the new sanctuary, framed on a stairway in the basement, shows a circular driveway with fin tailed sedans where the hackberry stands, and a parking lot in the center of Judge Stow’s Church Square.

Sometimes we have the collective wisdom to not heed all of the experts’ recommendations. So the humble common hackberry tree continues to thrive, long after those postwar landboats moulder in an automotive grave.

I have almost completed my first set of seasons back under the old hackberry tree, my first as an adult in my old hometown.  Not a Sunday goes by that I don’t pause to look up at its branches, to watch the sunlight filter through small serrated leaves, to watch snow coat the windward side of its jagged trunk, to watch small yellow leaves fall on an autumn lawn. And yes, to appreciate even its warty bark, ridged and corky.

In a few weeks buds will swell and leaves will unfurl again, sometime soon after we place daffodils on the old rugged cross beneath its boughs. As I walk out into the dappled sunlight, whatever hymn we have just sung will still be ringing in my head. I will look up at that canopy, composed of rough, imperfect, ovoid leaves, borne on this scaly warty trunk, a trunk rigged with lightening rods and cables, a tree susceptible to all sorts of ailments. A beautiful tree, all the more majestic in its imperfection.

I’ll look up at each of those sawtooth leaf blades, and I will think, these small imperfect leaves on this big tree are all the souls who set aside this square, who built these churches, who sang these songs.

In these songs we remember our faith, our scriptures, our theology. In this tree live all those saints, who sang our songs before us. Mr. Harding who held the front door open for you long after you had been away. Mrs. Underwood who wore a wide-brimmed hat. Mrs. Haught who made you a felt stocking in Preschool. Dr. Drake who signed your Bible in a left slanting script. Kevin who plunged into the ravine, Nancy whose smile lit the room, Steve who left us far too soon.

Ancient gnarled Silver Maple on Church Square.

So many seasons under this old tree, shedding its leaves, dropping some branches, bearing small sweet fruit through the depth of winter after the showier berries are long gone. Then it buds out again, faithfully, sometime shortly after the dogwood trees.