Several years ago, on what felt like a normal evening in early June, a terrible storm moved through the Midwest. It was a typical summer rainstorm, with loud rumbling thunder and lightning that looked like strobe lights. It lasted about thirty minutes before it began to quiet. I went to bed.
The next morning, after starting my first meeting of the day, my phone vibrated. My mother was calling.
She never called that early.
“Hi, honey,” she said, and then her voice broke. “You need to come home.”
The “typical” storm outside my house had been an entirely different thing where she lives, two hours northeast. Officially called a derecho, it is a rare and exceedingly destructive—and terrifying— storm. Derechos create hours of sustained, intense winds that rival those of hurricanes and tornadoes.
My mother had spent three hours on the stairs of her dark, cold, mud-floored cellar, wondering if she’d live through the night.
Everything was flattened, she told me. Roofs, barns, equipment, tractors— all gone.
I don’t know what to do, she said.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“Outside looking at the piles of damage. And he keeps looking up. At the sky. Like he isn’t sure what happened.” Her voice broke again.
I got in my car, driving fast, headed northeast, up the four-lane highway, turning right onto a two-lane road, then right again onto the small tar-and-chip rural road leading to my parents’ farm.
Why was I hurrying? To do something? No. The damage had been done.
My eyes almost couldn’t absorb the devastation. Barns with roofs ripped off. Grain bins torn to shreds. Garages caved in on crushed cars.
And the trees. Oh, the trees. It was as if a giant had come down from a horrible place, used his big massive hands and feet and ripped entire swaths of forest into mere toothpicks. Bricks and sticks were scattered across the entire county.
I wiped my cheeks as I got closer to my parents’ farm, wishing for a solution, knowing there was nothing that could be done. The massive cleanup efforts were exhausting and depressing and took several years.
A storm like that? It changes you.
One of the ways it has changed me is how I see trees.
For one thing, since that storm, I notice fallen branches, torn trunks, even scatterings of sticks. I see trees whose lives have abruptly ended, roots that have been ripped and cracked, trunks torn in two. And when I see these things, I feel a distinct sickening in my guts.
But since then, I am also much better at seeing trees that don’t fall.
I am truly moved when I notice trees that have been around for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years.
I see tall trees, the thick ones, the ones who stand staunch and true. Every spring, when leaves tiptoe out and then decorate the whole landscape with their lushness, when the summer is framed by the millions and millions of leaves, all chlorophyll and veins and midrib, I am astonished that they came back.
And I marvel.
It is a miracle, actually.
Of course, none of them are immune to a huge storm or a disease. Nothing is guaranteed. But there are those that keep on going, keep exploding with health each spring, keep adding rings to their trunks, who come out victorious and remind us that the earth is still rotating.
Trees represent strength and calm. They tell me things are as they should be.
Trees remind me of a lesson I learned years ago.
I was working as an assistant principal for a man named Rich. He was kind and caring and unrelentingly student-centered.
If there was a student who had been struggling in class, or perhaps wasn’t being very kind to other students, he’d sit them down for a talk.
“When’s the best time to plant a tree?” he’d ask.
I don’t know, they would say.
“Fifty years ago,” he said.
Pause.
“And when’s the second-best time to plant a tree?” Rich would ask.
I don’t know, they would say.
“Today.”
Pause.
And then a smile of understanding. I get it, they’d say.
“So what are we going to do differently today?” he’d ask, and a plan would begin to form.
Rich was right. It’s never too late to change things. To adjust, to improve, to re-commit. To launch a plan. To invest in something that will come to life years from now.
If there is something you’ve been wishing you had done years ago, maybe now is the time. If there is something you’ve been waiting to do, maybe today is the day you stop waiting and start doing.
Because today is the second-best day to do it.
Have a wonderful week.
Warmly,
Jen
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