The first thing folks encountered when visiting my childhood home was the old oak tree that stood in front of our house. More memories were made under that oak than I could count and it watched over our little family day and night, year after year. I learned how to aim a bb gun at my tin pie-plate target nailed to its trunk. I made a miniature snowman beneath its branches the one-and-only time I remember it snowing, and I memorized my times tables in its shade. The oak was my tree, or so it seemed, even after we sold my childhood home.
Recently, the tree needed to come down.
What I didn’t know was that my son, Grant, salvaged one last branch of my tree and snuck it into the Reunion workshop. In the days before Mother’s Day, he clocked late hours in the workshop: sanding, shaping, sculpting the branch into a beautiful bread bowl.
Yesterday, on Mother’s Day, he presented my tree to me in the form of a bread bowl that I can use forever. The same tears that fell after I learned of the tree’s cutting returned when I held the bowl in my hands.
This Mother’s Day reminded me that family bonds — whether flesh or bark — are too strong to be severed.
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