We Name the Things We Love

We always had plants inside and outside the house. My mom would sometimes name them. It made watering and caring for them more fun. Who wouldn’t want to be asked if they watered “Fanny the Fern?”

I’ve been trying to get my family stories and pictures in order. It’s symptomatic of being a librarian that I need to have things cataloged and browseable. Half of our pictures are in some kind of order, and the rest are in photobooks. In this journey, I have found that we are a family that really likes trees and plants. My next several posts are probably going to be about this. So feel free to “leaf” or “stick” around.

I don’t know when or how the Mulberry tree was planted. It was always huge in my mind and the center of Seedo’s hachoorah (garden). Five-year-old me couldn’t have come up with anything easier to say than “Toot.” That is what it is called in Arabic, and that is its name. There was no other tree like it in our Palestinian village.

We would climb it all year long and hang from its branches, and watch the comings and goings to the mosque from our perch. It never lost its leaves, at least not in my memories, and always had sweet berries when we needed a snack. My first daydreams happened on its branches and surely my first splinters.

When we were older, it was the place where we tried to build a tree house. Let the record show that six children between the ages of 15 and 7 with no experience of construction outside of IKEA furniture and legos were never going to be able to build a tree house. But we had the false confidence of youth, dreams, a hammer, some nails, and random plywood we found in storage. My mom loved that we had a project, and my baba was glad I wasn’t picking fights with my cousins.

The project lasted all of a week. It migrated from being a platform in the tree to a more reasonable nailed-together lean-to at the bottom of the tree. I have no photo evidence of our achievement. But when me and my brothers remisince about it, there is a sheepish smile of our dreams might have been bigger than our skill then.

It funny how we could probably build it now, but the hardest thing is finding the time to get us all together with a tree big enough to hold our next generation.