The Christmas Tree by Salamon Julie; Weber Jill;

Author:Salamon, Julie; Weber, Jill;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-06-28T22:23:04+00:00

Chapter Five

Teachers

Anyone who has had a friend or been one knows that it takes an awful lot of work. That’s especially true when one of you is human and the other is a tree. You can’t exactly ask what will make your friend happy, or what’s making him sad. Conversation becomes a rather imaginative game, and Sister Anthony had clearly become a master of it. (In fact, a lot of human-to-human friendships might improve if they took the care she took to understand that tree.)

This became obvious to me over the next few years as my Christmas-tree talk developed into an annual event. This did not feel like an obligation, because I always left with more than I came with. Though she had never left Brush Creek, Sister Anthony had an enviable excitement about life—not to mention an endless supply of stories. There was always a new crop of kids, so she could easily have repeated herself, but she continually seemed to find new mysteries to explore in the natural world, and new parables that could be drawn from her life. I don’t know how she did it. I’d traveled all over the world, seen my work written up regularly in the Times, yet so often I felt weary of it all.

I’d like to say I sat at her feet and just soaked up all that inspiration. Mostly, though, after the kids left, I’d start to complain—about the bureaucracy at work, about the public’s failure to appreciate all the beauty we spread out for them at Rockefeller Center, or whatever else was driving me crazy on that particular day. Sometimes I’d have a problem I couldn’t work out and Sister Anthony was almost always able to help just by asking the questions that would lead me to the answer.

“How do you do it?” I asked her one day.

“What’s that?” she replied.

“Tell stories the way you do,” I said, then corrected myself. “No, not just that. How did you become a teacher?”

She had been showing me a new herb garden she had planted that year. Each section was carefully marked with a tag explaining what the herb was used for, and a bit of folklore about it. I had just rubbed some rosemary between my fingers, and knew from then on the smell of rosemary would always remind me of Brush Creek.

She took some time to answer. “It all started with Tree, I suppose. After we first met he became part of my routine. I would go to morning prayers with the Sisters and help clean up after breakfast and then on sunny days I would immediately head outdoors.”

Unconsciously, her face tilted toward the sun. “Every day I discovered something new—a bird whose song I hadn’t heard before, a patch of wildflowers. My expeditions always ended with Tree, so I could report on what I’d found that day. No matter how much fun I had on my own, my adventures always felt the truest when I turned them into stories for Tree.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.