The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago

and the second best time is now

2011

We find the old farmhouse on a Pennsylvania Craigslist post from a couch in our home in Utah. The house is old and white with peeling paint; an aging matriarch well past her prime. A beautiful wraparound porch is situated just feet from a road ribboning through a small country village called Hublersburg, near where my in-laws live in the quaintly named Sugar Valley.

Actual Craiglist photo

My mother-in-law and brother-in-law walk through the house in lieu of us as we anxiously wait for texts of interior photos. The house is big, two stories with two staircases - front and back - and has the kind of nooks and crannies two toddlers could get lost in and a backyard of rolling green grass that waterfalls into the playground of the elementary school the toddlers will one day attend.

This is the dream.

We secure the house via email and mailed checks and a few months later we tetris our belongings into the bright yellow moving truck. A cross-country adventure like the one five years before when we tearfully left the Manhattan skyline in our rearview mirrors. He sobbed all the way across the Verrazzano bridge. I vividly remember that. I felt terrible for forcing us to leave the city of dreams.

Now, back east again in search of new careers, a change of pace, of life. Me in the Honda Pilot with a toddler and a 4-month-old and my husband in the big rig with our two black labs, Max and Milo.

The landlord tells us our new home was once the town’s parsonage. It’s my dream house, I think, and assure myself I will own it one day. Sure it’s probably held together with Amish prayers, horsehair plaster, and knob and tube electrical wiring from the early 19th century, but it also seems like the kind of stalwart they-don’t-build-em-like-this-anymore home sturdy enough to last through an apocalypse.

With its hardwood floors, solid doors flaunting antique hardware and theological pedigree it feels almost venerable in its own provincial manner. Exactly the kind of farmhouse you envision when you dream of living in a small village in the country.

Located about thirty minutes outside of State College, Pennsylvania, the former parsonage has a kooky floor plan, a huge attic in which Clark Griswold would watch home movies for hours and where I imagine setting up an office to write a book, a cellar that surely once housed rows and rows of Ball Mason jars filled with preserves, solid wood pocket doors separating the living room and dining room, and other beautiful old interior doors featuring beveled glass windows and locks requiring antique keys to open.

And of course, there’s the aforementioned wrap-around porch, perfect for lounging on hot summer days or quiet purple-y-gray evenings. I imagine rocking my babies as we watch storms roll in and out of our green valley.

Envisioning a zen/zaftig version of me swanning through a garden bursting with ripe tomatoes, children and dogs frolicking around my feet, I am thrilled. This is the first time in my married life I am living in a home in which I hope to raise my family. I want to nest, to put down roots—literally.

So I buy trees not much taller than me and spend hours walking around the backyard squinting at all the angles and sight lines, planting each tree in just the right spot that in ten years time I won’t see a single neighbor, just trees and green, protecting us from the world.

While perusing yard sales one Saturday, we find the perfect porch swing and lug it back to our garage where it promptly receives a fresh coat of white paint.

There is swanning and frolicking for a time. There is also a devastating house fire, a traumatic move and rebuilding that feels like it takes a lifetime and then there is a final summer back in the parsonage when the garden of my dreams blossoms into reality; squash, eggplant, tomatoes, onions and pumpkin abound. There is a beautiful baby boy born in the living room the following winter. Finally, there is divorce.

In 2014, we leave our dream farmhouse and I’d like to say I never look back. But I have always looked back. How could I not?

2015

I didn't anticipate it would happen like this. I am doubled over in the darkness, hands on knees, swallowing sobs. Ugly cry sobs. But then again, I haven’t anticipated pretty much anything that's happened over the past two years, so there you go.

My co-worker-turned-life-friend Doug and I are driving around the emerald Pennsylvania countryside letting the setting sun, music, and air mingle around us in a kaleidoscope of summer joy.

As the sinking sun singes everything a shadowy gold we ended up cruising out to my old house. The one out in the country. Where Charlie was born. The last house we lived in as a family before the divorce.

For fun I had decided to show Doug where I lived before he knew me. But this is not fun. This is where Charlie gasped his first breaths of life, where my marriage sputtered to death.

As we turn onto the old road that leads past the house I fall silent in painful remembrance. Telling Doug to wait a minute, I park the car down the street and walk to the house as sunset gold slowly gives way to purple gloaming while he remains in the car scrolling on his phone.

The parsonage is dark save for the bluish tones of a television glowing spectrally from the upstairs bedroom I used to call mine. Ours. I stand quietly in the falling darkness, crickets serenading, and I gaze at that window. My body trembles as my life on the other side of the glass all those years ago flickers through my brain like developing polaroids.

My husband spray-painting letters laid on the driveway spelling out V-I-O-L-E-T and H-E-N-R-Y to hang on their playroom wall and singing “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” to them in an impossibly ridiculous falsetto while cooking his signature stir fry and tapping his boot heavily on the kitchen floor; Walking Dead/Breaking Bad/The Wire marathons; scream-crying into a towel in the bathroom while he watches TV alone; my baby standing in her bedroom door calling out “Mama?” as flames rage around her; in shock, frantically stuffing what remained after the fire in garbage bags and leaving what feels like a dead home; trying so hard; where is my mind; too many beers; moving back in when we never thought it possible; never enough money; good wet dirt and planting onions, tomatoes, squash; hateful words; weeding; trying so hard; more crying; panic attacks; a lush garden; a new baby on the way; how do I have a baby without healthcare; laboring heavily, body heaved across my bed as Charlie pushes his way out of my swollen, aching body.

So much hope, pain, love and loss.

I don't know what I expected driving out here, what I want or need but now that I’m here I need to get up close to the house. I want to touch it. Be with it. Sit on its porch in an effort to be cradled by my old home. I long to walk through the rooms, hands lightly running along banisters, walls, windows, as I close my eyes and remember my family and the time we spent in this house.

Even though we moved out more than a year ago, my existence in this home still tingles in my blood. It’s my favorite place I lived during my marriage. The bones of this home are my bones. I gave birth in this home. I could close my eyes and negotiate my way from the kitchen to the bedroom without touching anything because my molecules had merged with the house’s molecules and we sensed each other, monitored each other’s moods.

Oh hello, you.

Even now my body wants me/the house wants me to go sit on the porch, close my eyes, listen to the symphony of the night and melt into a version of me from the past. A vertiginous experience of familiarity and foreignness battles in my brain. This is MY house. No, it's not! It will always be my house! Someone else lives here now.

It's not just a house to me, it's a character from my past. Like running into a high school friend at the grocery store. Oh, hi, How ARE you? You look so good. I miss you! Remember when…

The other day I asked my ex-husband which house was his favorite of all the places we lived together. Without hesitation he said the Hublersburg house. It was the first house we thought we'd live in forever. It was the last house we lived in together.

I stand in the violet twilight and, like tonguing a sore tooth, let the memories gush from my brain. I remember triumphantly pulling up in the moving truck from Utah. I remember lying on the porch swing and singing to my babies when it rained. I remember loving the little bar he dreamed into existence. I remember reading Dr. Seuss over and over and over. I remember planting trees I believed I'd witness into maturity. I remember laboring for hours in the bedroom and finally, between contractions, racing down the stairs to jump in a pool of water to release my son from my body. I remember tiredly holding Charlie for the first time while his dad laugh-cried beside me. I remember him dropping the needle on our favorite Frank Sinatra record to welcome our boy to the world. I remember knowing my marriage was over.

I remember still loving him but knowing the marriage was over.

I remember an equal amount of love and laughter and hatred and fighting.

In each other's shadows we grew less and less tall
And eventually our theories couldn't explain it all
And I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall
And when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all

-Both Hands, Ani DiFranco

My son took his first gasps of life in that home. My marriage died in that house.

Outsider now, body shaking, tears streaming down my face, I stare up at the house in which I used to exist, day in and day out, and imagine myself two or three years earlier; on the porch, singing quietly to my sweet, innocent babies unaware that future Monica is hovering on the perimeter of this blissful scene, body racked with anguish over all that has transpired since that moment. Porch Monica is blissfully unaware. Or keeps trying to convince herself all is well. All isn’t well even though she mostly pretends that it is. It never was.

But we tried, oh how we tried.

Sometimes the pain is like a wild animal biting down on my flesh and shaking its head until I pass out from the agony.

How many future Monicas are hovering around me now? Are we our own angels?

2023

Many years ago I read a Chinese proverb I’ve never forgotten.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is now.”

With no plans to move until our youngest boys graduate high school, Cory and I spent this summer planting as many trees as we could afford to buy in the yard of the cozy, mid-century red brick rambler we bought last year in a little college town in Pennsylvania.

Last weekend we planted a small birch tree in the front yard and speculated how tall it would be in ten years when we plan to sell the house and head for warmer climes. If warmer climes don’t find us here first.

I remembered that I planted a birch in the backyard of my old house in Hublersburg just about a decade ago and suggested we take a drive to peek through the fence and see what the tree looks like now that all this time has passed.

These days, every time I’m out that way, I turn off the main road and detour through the little village to offer a wistful hello to the house. I’ve watched the trees we planted in the front yard grow taller than the house but I haven’t seen the backyard since we left.

Seeing the house that held such hope for me always fucks me up a little, even still. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because my ex-husband and I haven’t spoken in many years, so the life I lived there with him feels more distant than it would otherwise. Maybe it’s because the most intense moments of my life went down in that house. Or maybe it’s residual grief from the death of a dream? The why doesn’t really seem important anymore.

We worked so hard to move there and then a house fire forced us out. We moved back in after the landlords rebuilt the fire-damaged upstairs and I think maybe that was the most hopeful time of all. After I became pregnant with Charlie but before I stopped lying to myself. Maybe the fire was a baptism of sorts and we could start over and be better versions of ourselves, I had thought at the time.

Cory pulls the car into the parking lot of the school directly behind the house, exactly where Doug had sat the last time I stopped to say hello to the house all those years ago. The same elementary school I thought my kids would walk to every day by unlatching the backyard gate that opened right onto the playground. I peek through that gate and immediately start to cry.

What was once a barren rectangle of lawn in 2012 is now covered by a canopy of all the trees I planted after the house fire. The birch is strong and towering, limbs stretched protectively over the backyard, beautiful white bark peeling thickly from its trunk like ancient, gnarled dinosaur scales.

The row of bushes I planted along one fence to block out the creepy neighbor who drank beer and yelled at his wife and daughters soared skyward, gracefully arching well past the top of the fence, completely obscuring his piss-colored house with its tattered Trump 2020 banner.

Outdoor lights decorate the trees, their branches clutching swooping strands aloft as if playing a game of tree jump rope above a well-worn trampoline, evidence that kids have logged some serious backyard hours.

It is the backyard of my dreams. The exact one I envisioned as a married mom of little ones all those years ago. It astounds me to realize this massive oasis of trees and bushes came from me.

“Look at this! I did this! This is all me!” I tell Cory in awe while placing my hand gently across my heart feeling like Tom Hanks creating fire in Castaway.

I stare and sob, but this time out of sheer astonishment and joy over the miraculous nature of dreams and time. What had been an empty patch of depressing lawn is a peaceful, verdant space populated by bushes and trees rocketing into the blue sky.

I gape at my sweet Cory and try to articulate how wild it is to see that the dream I always believed had died is still alive, in a way. Thriving even. The dream just revealed itself in a different way than I thought it would, like finding Cory in the wake of a terrible divorce.

When we return to the car I ask Cory if he’ll drive past the house. We’re rolling slowly by and I’m pointing out various things to Cory when a man emerges from the garage and waves a friendly hello. Usually one for avoiding all social interactions, I surprise myself and Cory by telling him to stop and then motion the man over to explain who I am.

He tells me he lives there with his girlfriend and daughter, who was five when they moved in, the same age my Blake was when we last lived there. His daughter’s room was Blake’s room. The same room that went up in flames when that ancient knob and tube wiring began popping and sizzling inside the walls.

The man says his daughter, who is now in middle school, walked through the back gate every morning to get to the elementary school, just as I had imagined Blake would all those years ago.

It feels right. Meant to be. My dream lived out by another family with a different little girl, all while being watched over by those massive trees that grew from fragile saplings I planted so long ago when all I had was dreams.

2024

I write this last paragraph from the same swing that hung on the porch of that first Pennsylvania farmhouse all those years ago. A buttery yellow color now, it hangs from the beautiful maple tree in the front yard of the home my partner Cory and I managed to buy about two seconds before it became next to impossible to own a home.

We love this house. It is the first house I have ever owned. We got really lucky.

I think of sitting in this very swing all those years ago, rocking my babies while rain beats a rhythm on the porch roof. I see my ex-husband proudly hammering a birdhouse into a tree across the driveway and walking back towards us, a hopeful grin lighting up his sweet, shining face.

I see my children now, a decade older, playing basketball in the new driveway and I think of the concept of time; a human construct in defiance of reality or all the realities. Everything everywhere all at once.

I think of all the versions of me, of my ex-husband, his wife, my partner, the six incredible children between us, and the amazing people and experiences who have and will still come into our lives because of everything that has transpired in the way that it has. If not for that, we wouldn’t have this. If not for each other, we wouldn’t be us.

I feel the ghosts of future Monicas surrounding me now, helping me move toward my best self, the self that understands that life is just one big dream.

A blink and we are gone. Stardust. Yes, we are our own angels.

Holding on to pain and anger only hurts those who cling so tightly but we all do what we can, I guess.

I love you I hate you I forget you I remember you I miss you I forgive you I despise you I adore you I see you I hate you. I love you.

Understanding is overrated. There will always be competing realities.

I rock gently in this worn wooden swing that the father of my children helped me carry to our car at a yard sale all those years ago and my heart swells with pain and love. I whisper an acknowledgment to the ghosts of Monica future always with me, always wishing me the very best, urging me ever forward, knowing what I’m going through now will lead me to becoming them.

I stand up from my swing, give the baby birch and the ghosts a nod of thankful acknowledgment, and as the sun sets behind shadowy cornstalks, I walk into my home and close the door.