Inspiration can come from anywhere. Last week a friend of mine posted this clip from Jimmy Rees. He's a really funny Australian comedian. If you haven't see the clip yet I'll wait while you go watch it. And now you know where the inspiration for this short story came from...
The things you believe as a child are sometimes really funny. She wasn't thinking about the things that adults led you to believe like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but things that you thought up on your own and were just so sure you were right. Things you never even tried to get clarification on because you just knew them.
It made sense when you looked back. Not the funny things you believed, but how you got there. Most of life is based on context clues really. You see things, or hear things, and just slot them in to the logical box they belong. When you are little you have a lot less context to use. You still do it, you still slot things in where you think they belong, but you just don't know enough yet to realize that is the wrong box.
Her grandmother had died before she was born. She had died so young that even her father had never met her. But every Mother's Day, every anniversary of the day she died, her birthday, almost all the major holidays, they would go to the cemetery and visit with her.
They would pull weeds and water the tree that marked her grave. They would each take turns telling grandma whatever they felt like talking to her about. Then before they left her father would take the kids and leave her mother to visit with her own mother alone.
It was just a normal part of growing up.
Thinking it was normal wasn't the odd thing. A lot of families visit the graves of their dead. A lot of people talk to them like they can still hear them. It might not be everyone but it's not all that rare.
No, the funny part, the odd part, was that she believed her grandmother was the tree.
People would talk about family branches or roots. Or how the apple didn't fall far from the tree. She had heard all of these things and so it made sense to her that her grandmother was a tree. And they took really good care of the tree. They would make sure it had plenty of water, and that the branches were healthy. When they left flowers for her grandmother they left them at the base of the tree. Her mother would kneel under the tree, leaning against the trunk, while she visited.
It just made sense that her grandmother was the tree.
She was probably 8 or 9 when the reality settled in that her grandmother's grave was marked by the tree. That she wasn't a tree. That it didn't make sense that her grandmother would be a tree. It wasn't one of those situations where she said something embarrassing, thank goodness. There was no report in class about her family tree actually including a tree. It was just one of those things that as she sat under the shade of the tree visiting with her grandmother she had a moment where she understood that she had always thought of her grandmother as the tree, and that she wasn't the tree.
It was hard to explain.
Partly because she never did. She never told anyone how she thought her grandmother was a tree when she was little. Or that she reached an age where she understood that she wasn't. That it would be impossible. Some things just didn't need to be explained. They were just funny things you kept to yourself about how silly you were as a child.
And of course she hadn't thought about it ages. She might not have ever thought about it again if it hadn't been for the paperwork her mother had just sent over.
Her mother was older. Her health was failing. They all knew it was just a matter of time now. And her mother having dealt with the untimely and unplanned death of her own mother wanted to make sure that they all knew exactly what to do when she passed. What she wanted for her funeral service. What songs were to be played and who would sing, who she wanted to speak and who she absolutely did not, and...
where she wanted to be planted.
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