The Linda Tree

Nine years later.

When I was a kid, we moved every couple of years. I met children who had lived in one town their whole lives, and whose parents were born there too. Not me, I was always the new kid.

This wanderlust pattern continued into my adult years--we moved every few years until eventually I fell in love with a place in 2004 and I stayed. This place, where I have lived now for over twenty years.

What is twenty years in the scheme of things? Even nine of those twenty years is long enough to witness a tree growing.

In 2015, here at Dancing TreePeople Farm, I and my farm mates planted a tree--named for my sister Linda who passed away in January of that year.

The Linda Tree was planted in March 2015:

It was a grafted plum and pluot—”a fruit salad” tree. I thought Linda would appreciate that.

Now, in 2024, a year of transition for all of us, our farm mates decided to recreate the moment. Here is the Linda Tree now:

Yes, even nine years is long enough to see something good come of one's efforts, but not nearly long enough to fully understand how to bring life back to the land.

Not long ago here in Lake County, beaver slowed and spread the water, clear lake hitch filled the streams as they spawned in the spring, grizzly roamed the hills, and the sky and lake surface filled with migratory birds. Those who came before us witnessed all of this--and there a a few who still remember some of it.

What must it have been like to be from a place like this? To have observed the land for not only your own lifetime, but to hold the stories of your ancestors who walked these lands for centuries? What would it be like to be born and then to live out your entire life in one place? Is a single lifetime even enough to know a place? It is they who have memories of what is was like to see the hitch in the creeks and the wetlands surrounding the Lake? To know a grandmother tree by name?

For my part, I feel fortunate that I've lived here for twenty years—long enough to remember what Cobb Mountain was like before the Valley Fire, to remember the year Main Street in Upper Lake flooded, and what a ride on The Clear Lake Queen was like. I do not remember the Forks Fire--that was before my time, but I've met many people who do. Some remember the tribal people lighting "good fire" on the land each winter until it was stopped by authorities in the sixties or seventies. They predicted the Forks Fire and other big fires would be the result and they were right.

And I realize this: I am still the new kid here.

For now, I plant and cultivate trees as a way to honor the land and those who have gone before. Perhaps the Linda Tree will witness the rebirth of this place long after we have moved on. Maybe one day, the redwoods we've planted here will capture the clouds.