<Image from Haute Nature>
When I was seven, in second grade, Adrian, one of my classmates formed a ragtag group to investigate the case of the weeping tree. Our school was surrounded by a number of old, gnarly and seemingly wise Acacia trees. Because our classes were only in the afternoon, the five of us set a time, arriving a few minutes before class to do our case study. We choose the gnarliest, most expansive of the trees as our point of interest. The tree was at the back of the school, near the Home Economics house, separated from the main building by a small garden . We’d go to the tree with our school scissors, some pencils, pad papers, masking tapes and and wads of cotton. We’d be mesmerized, with full belief in the importance of the task: solve the mystery of the crying tree. We'd trace the width of its trunk, sopping up the still wet yellow tears with cotton. In our quest to comfort the tree, we’d bandage his wounds, the part where the tears were, placing cotton over the wound and taping it. Some places, the tears have hardened, turrning into these irregularly sized drops of caramelly yellow. We’d remove them, patiently. Our young nails digging to remove these scabs.
We’d look at this acacia tree with wonderment. There is a mystery here. He’s crying because he’s cold. I’d surmise that perhaps an encantada (fairy) lives high above the tree, and those tears are hers. The boys thought a creature who is half-horse, half-man lives inside the bark of the tree, coming out only at night. Our favorite guess, one that thrilled us to no end was that somewhere in the tree is a gate to another place, a wonderland. And so for sometime, we’d come to visit it, all business and seriousness, cleaning him of his tears, tending to his wounds, and looking, hoping for the hidden door.
I think it only took us a week to get bored. There was nothing to find, except more tears each day. No door, no sign of the fairy. It's during this time that we discovered Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and found the mysteries we were craving in those books. Of course a few more years of science classes taught us that those tears were nothing but the tree’s bark milk. Yet as I remember that experience I cannot help but smile at our wonderment. That childhood sense of limitless possibilities. At so young an age, to pursue something we truly believed in, and then after realizing that we could not explain it all, when it became nothing but a seemingly unexplainable part of nature, we moved on to other interests.
As kids we learn this things, this need to fill our questions with something. We were braver, more undaunted by doubts. But each year grown makes us lose this quality. Bit by bit we get burdened by what can and can't be done. Our lives filled with a river separating the good and the rotten, the possible and the implausible. But is being too realistic a good way to live? Our lot will not necessarily improve, but I think a little more faith is like a pinch of cinnamon on an otherwise ordinary mug of hot coffee. It adds some dazzle, some spark of magnificence to each of us. We all had it as kids ramming into all sorts of seemingly foolish games and projects, why not reclaim some of it?
Recalling the memory of the weeping tree, I am reminded that there are things that we really opt to relearn from childhood.
