✨remembering✨
Her daddy’s parents lived on the right side of the tracks, in a big white two-story house with six bedrooms, two living rooms, a billiards room, and a glassed-in porch that caught the afternoon sun. The porch always smelled faintly of lemons and magnolia blossoms. Her grandmother’s plants lined every window sill… ferns and spider plants that seemed to stretch toward the light like they were praying.
Two old magnolias framed the front of that house. Their thick branches reached out like arms that had seen generations come and go. One of them had low limbs… just right for a little girl to climb.
Whenever she missed her daddy, she’d scale that tree until she reached the tippy top, where the air felt thinner and the world looked softer. She’d wedge herself between two sturdy branches, knees scraped, hair tangled, heart aching. Up there, the sun couldn’t find her, and neither could the truth… that her daddy was gone and wasn’t coming back.
She couldn’t bear to let her grandmother see her cry. That same grandmother had already lost her baby boy. That was a sorrow she prayed she’d never understand. So instead, she’d climb.
And the higher she went, the freer her imagination became.
Some days, she was a fairy doctor tending to the wounded bugs and butterflies, mixing potions from leaves, mud, and rainwater gathered in the creases of the bark. Other days, she was a pirate, perched on the highest branch, spying for enemy ships through a toilet paper tube she’d turned into a telescope. And sometimes, when the wind whispered just right, she’d close her eyes and pray. She wanted to get close enough to heaven that maybe God Himself would reach down and hold her while she cried.
Her grandmother would come to the porch, apron tied around her waist, calling her name in that gentle but worried tone. “You come on down now, baby. You’re too high up there. You’re scaring me half to death.”
She’d pretend not to hear, smiling to herself, watching her grandmother’s hands flutter on her hips. But eventually she’d climb down, twigs in her hair and dirt on her arms, and they’d sit on the steps together while her grandmother told stories about how her daddy used to do the same thing… how he’d climb that very tree, disappearing into the green, and how she’d stand there calling for him too.
That’s when she started to wonder if her daddy had been hiding from something even back then. Maybe not from his mama, but from the heaviness he carried even as a boy.
Years passed. The magnolia grew taller, and so did she. She stopped climbing trees. Stopped going to that big white house after her grandparents were gone. Life carried her elsewhere… to love, to loss, to a divorce she never saw coming.
But life has a funny way of circling back.
When she bought her own little house, with her own two hands and prayers, there in the front yard stood another magnolia… grand and familiar, like a whisper from her past.
Every morning, she’d step outside barefoot, coffee in hand, dew still cool between her toes. She’d look up at those branches and smile, telling that old magnolia stories of her childhood… the days she hid from sorrow in another tree, the grandmother who loved her with quiet strength, and the daddy she never quite stopped missing.
Sometimes, when the wind brushed through the leaves, she could almost hear them answering. Almost hear her grandmother’s voice again, soft and steady: “You come on down now, baby. You’re high enough.”
And standing there in her yard, years later, she realized that magnolia had given her something she hadn’t known she needed. It rooted her. It reminded her that even grief can bloom into grace.
That tree became her peace. Her prayer. Her proof that even the hardest things can grow into something beautiful again.
“Storms make trees take deeper roots.”