I Was a Kid Challenge - Upside Down in a Willow Tree

Upside Down in a Willow Tree

When I was five or six, I wrote a song. I remember walking around the summer camp and wailing my creation loudly enough for everyone to hear. It was years before I learned that I was essentially tone-deaf and vowed to never sing in public. I had birds and trees and flowers in the song, and mostly, my mom. Mom was the reason that every summer my brother and I traveled thousands of miles from somewhere North of Siberia where we lived to the mountains by the Black Sea where the camp was. Mom was in charge of the camp.

The camp was a way for high school kids to get some sun and earn pocket money picking produce. My brother and I were spared the physical labor for the first few years, so picking strawberries never made it into my song. Being upset at mom for not letting me climb a particular tree did.

It was a weeping willow, and the tallest tree that I have seen anyone climb and not fall out of. In my song, I had the tree scratching the bellies of clouds, so, in retrospect, there is a chance the clouds were hanging unusually low on that specific day, while my tree was probably quite ordinary.

Mom must have just read a book on raising kids properly and, to my absolute horror, realized that there were inherent differences between boys and girls. It was suddenly alright for my brother to wear nothing but a pair of shorts if he so desired, which, by the way, he never did, while I had to be paraded around the village in some polka-dotted frilly, flimsy thing that would inevitably expose my undies if I were to be found hanging from a tree branch the only way I knew how to - upside down.

My brother exhibited not the slightest desire to hang from that tree, or any other tree for that matter, but telling mom that she must have got us somehow mixed up and he should have the polka dots didn’t help with my quest for a pair of shorts.

And so I’d patiently wait for her to be gone a safe distance from the camp before I’d dared approach the tree.

One branch in particular beckoned me. It was long and thin and asymmetrical. It dangled upwards from the trunk, then sloped down as if someone had accidentally tied a bucket of bricks to its latter section, and it had smaller branches growing from that point any which way, ever at the ready to poke an unsuspecting eye out.

Every chance I had, I would walk up to my tree and watch local boys climb all the way to the top, and then drop onto that branch, and repel down to where the smaller branches started. The branch would bend, lowering the climber all the way to the ground, gently. Letting go of the branch safely took some practice, as it would spring back up with such force that if one got caught in the face, there’d be blood and tears and wailing for help.

The storms in that place were always violent. The air started to smell of static, and swallows flew low to the ground for long before the sky turned dark, and the first drops hit the parapets. At the first sign of impending storm we were ushered into our respective dorms, which most often consisted of a large collection of glorified military tents placed upon slabs of concrete.

I remember trying to watch the lightning through the window next to my bed. The nights were so dark, I couldn’t see much in front of me, but with every strike, the sky lit up lavender and splashed pinks on the ground. I could see my willow tree, outlined wet black with every strike, swaying violently now. I trained my eyes on the spot where I knew the tree was and waited for the sky to light up. I was imagining that the tree was calling out to me, stretching toward me with its slender branches. There was a knot in the pit of my belly that I couldn’t explain, something clawing at it from the inside. The storm seemed to last forever, and I must have finally dozed off.

In the morning, the sun shone brightly on my willow tree, split in half and leafless, two crooked sooty stumps, with limbs, also black, slumped to the ground gracelessly, with my branch spread out flatly toward my dorm.

That morning I rummaged through my suitcase and pulled out an old pair of shorts and a t-shirt and the only concession to my gender that I would make for the next few years came in the shape of an ugly brown dress for my school uniform.

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