The Biology of Change

I’m in the car with my son, his wife and their daughter. They are moving from a place they love to a place they are meant to go. Almost everything is unknown.

I am along to help with my granddaughter. Our drive takes us through a town where I spent 27 years. And my kids know I will savor the trip on Route 66 through my childhood.

We pull off the highway. I direct them to the neighborhood where I grew up, but I miss the entrance. It looks so different. 

As we drive the tree-lined hill that leads to my home, time shifts to a summer day in the 1970s and for a moment I see a girl on a bike. 

Standing to pump the pedals of my green Schwinn with handbrakes and a wide seat, I feel a gust of hot air. Blonde bangs stick to my sweaty face, the rest of my hair is pulled into a ponytail. I’m wearing a striped shirt, shorts and PF flyers, windjammer style. I traverse my neighborhood streets, free of school and chores. Some days I ride with my cousin, my brother or a friend. Other times my bike carries me into stretches of solitude as I cruise past Bermuda grass lawns. 

At the top of the hill, I’m hit with the scent of honeysuckle from dozens of bushes in my neighbor’s yard. Some days I stop long enough to pluck a white blossom, pinch the end, pull the stem through and lick a drop of nectar. Other days I keep pedaling, powered by the sweet aroma for the next block.

I turn the corner to my house and see the oak tree that my dad planted as a sapling.

It grew to shade the front porch and much of the front yard. It stood sentinel to years of family history. Under the oak tree, I played school with my little sister, retrieved Wiffle balls with my brothers, and posed for pictures with my prom date. The last time I walked out the door of my childhood house, I walked under the oak to my car. 

After 30 years of living in that place — when the tree was a couple of stories high and they were preparing to sell the house — my parents gave me two flower pots overflowing with geraniums. 

Acorns had fallen from the tree into the potting soil and produced a few tiny oak shoots. (I love the idea that they planted themselves.) I carefully moved the pots to a new home in St. Louis and later to Utah. 

When my husband and I built our house in Utah I remembered the sapling oak and how it grew to provide shade and beauty and stability. Plus I was missing home. So Scott planted a sapling in our yard on the mountain next to aptly-named scrub oaks. I watched over it, but our oak didn’t survive. The soil, air, sunlight and rainfall were too different from its natural habitat.

I knew the feeling; I felt out of place when I moved there too. 

Now decades later in Tulsa,  we drive past the neighbor’s house with the sweet scent. The honeysuckle bushes are gone.

We round the corner and the majestic oak is still there. I take my granddaughter’s hand and kneel under the original tree. I see scattered acorns. Some hard shells are intact. A few shells are broken open. 

Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.

Hannah Whitall Smith

I think about change. It always seems to be accompanied by loss. We trade familiar places (physical, mental and emotional) for the unknown. We lose landmarks, friends, and who we think we are. Everything is new. We have to adjust.

But from a smooth brown acorn to wrecked seed comes a small sapling that grows into a mature tree that can live hundreds of years. 

The germination process is risky and only a small percentage of acorns grow into trees. But those that do. They grow to their magnificent potential. 

I walk away from my childhood home, but this time I am not an 18-year-old heading to college. I am not a young mother leaving the house before the new owner moves in. I leave the house with my children and grandchild. 

We move on.

In a few days, we pull up to their new home. I hold each one close, feeling how they are breaking open, and knowing that’s all they can feel right now.

I remember the acorn and can almost see the germination in a new place, a place they were meant to be.