green

plant study 45
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

When I was a boy, our house was surrounded by large trees, and the yard was full of thick shrubs and bushes. My mother was an enthusiastic gardener, and was always planting things. In sixth grade, I began to hate school. So from time to time I would leave the house in the morning, as if to walk to catch the bus. But instead I would walk until I was out of sight from the windows of our house--in case someone was watching me--and then furtively double back, through other yards, to hide in the bushes on the side of our house until my mother had left for the day. I would spend my day deep inside the canopy of leaves, letting my imagination occupy the hours, until it was time for me to return home from school. Then I would climb out (making sure no one saw me) and enter the house as if it were a normal day. I do not remember how I handled the required absence note; most likely I forged my mother's writing, which I did well. I did not do this often enough to elicit suspicion from my teachers. To this day, my crimes always skirt the edge of total corruption, but never cross the line.


In later years, I expanded my scope. We had a huge weeping willow which grew in a shallow dip at the edge of our property. I loved that tree; it was so beautiful and its long dangling branches, whips, blew so gracefully in the wind. I would get high and climb up to a point where the natural split in the tree trunk formed a wide seat. There, I would watch the goings-on of the neighborhood. I never felt a part of the local gang of kids, so I always preferred my own company, and in that kind of elevated solitude I felt good. Sometimes, as my drug use grew more varied, I would trip on acid and climb into the tree. I was driving by then, and had a cheap car that I parked on the street in front of my mother's house. I think she was perplexed when the car was there, but I was nowhere in sight. When the drugs wore off enough I would climb down and then re-enter the normal world.


A year ago my aunt, my mother's much-younger sister, came to visit from Florida. We went to Bethlehem, the small Pennsylvania city where my mother had grown up. We visited a family that had known my mother's family well and lived a few houses away. The old lady, who had Alzheimer's, but was still amiable and chatty, kept repeating how my grandmother grew glorious roses and had a flourishing garden. Later we drove by the house where my mother grew up. It was a stately house, not too large, but lovely. The trees were well-tended, even in the winter's greyness.


I found out recently that my mother's husband, who kept the house I grew up in, in Warminster, after she died, cut down the willow tree (and the crabapple, and the plum trees, and the red maple) and ripped out all the shrubs. I have never had the courage to drive down Wellington Drive. I have not been there since she died. I don't want to see the house without those plantings. My mother loved her house, as humble as it was, and she loved her garden. Now, I photograph plants obsessively, and my paintings are inspired by them as well. It is in my blood.