The Body as Tree

By Andrea Scarpino

 

“I cried a lot. And I was glad I could cry,” my mother said, describing her weekend. Her baby brother is dying of cancer, stage 4 in his lungs and brain. “He never smoked, never even took a drink,” she tells me repeatedly. My mother, on the other hand, Zac calls the Keith Richards of the family, a woman who has made innumerable poor health choices with seemingly no adverse repercussions, who seems on the verge of death on a regular basis and just keeps bouncing back.

 

Last week, I ate a lunch I’ve eaten hundreds of times, but within minutes, both of my arms burned with hives, my face flushed red, the back of my throat itched. An allergic reaction? To food I eat all the time? My mother defies death regularly, and I feel like I’m barely clinging to life, like I never know what curveball my body will decide to throw next. And I wonder often if I’m creating my own problems, if paying such close attention to my body makes me hyperaware of issues other people wouldn’t even notice.

 

For several years when I was growing up, we lived on a small lake in Michigan called Wing Lake. Our backyard was filled with trees: a huge willow that fell one night in a hurricane, a sour cherry tree, pear trees. But my favorites were two apple trees that stood side-by-side, bloomed in white arcs every spring, and produced small, mealy treats that mostly the geese ate. The apple trees had low branches my brother and I climbed and rode like horses, pushing ourselves up and down through the air. My body moved gracefully among their branches. My body felt free. Powerful. Full of light.

 

A friend asked me recently about my pain issues, how I’ve been feeling. And I realized I don’t want to talk about my pain anymore. I’m tired of it, of worrying, of living in a body I’m sure will let me down, of writing and thinking about the body as a site of continual collapse, continual loss. My grandmother had breast cancer, a mastectomy, my aunt has had breast cancer twice. My father, colon cancer, diabetes, a tracheotomy. And now my uncle is dying. I want the body to be something else: a site of joy, of happiness. I want my mother’s resiliency. Or barring that, I want at least to feel my body again in those apple trees. To feel in myself a wildness. A blossoming.