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Water the Tree, Coil the Hose
How to grow a family
There’s a river birch with four spindly trunks in the very back of our backyard. Four years ago, my husband and I planted it there for shade and symbolic gesture. It was a wedding ceremony, but we’d already been married two years, and no one attended except for our eighteen-month-old twins. Still, we four were the trunks of this tree, fused together at the base with shared roots. This ceremony was for us.
On our wedding day, our toddlers wore blue polka-dot raincoats and pink unicorn rain boots with mud-slathered pants. An early autumn storm was coming, remnants of a late-season hurricane from the Atlantic. It had already begun to drizzle, and the girls were ready for a full-on puddle party.
As they chased each other through the trees, my husband and I exchanged promises for a better future.
Then Mike aided the slow-dripping sky with the sprinkler and the twins squealed and scampered under the spray. We lived in the middle of North Carolina, so these storms usually lost their power before they got to us. Still, we thought it best to plant the tree before a rainfall. Even more importantly, that Saturday in October was the date I’d picked for the big wedding we were supposed to have: 10/10/2020. To my mystical mind…
