Wishtree

by Katherine Applegate

Trees have a rather complicated relationship with people, after all. One minute you’re hugging us. The next minute you’re turning us into tables and tongue depressors.

Hollows are proof that something bad can become something good with enough time and care and hope.

Nature is not always pretty or fair or kind. But sometimes surprises happen. And Samar, every spring night, reminded me there is beauty in stillness and grace in acceptance.

Still, trees are luckier than people in one way. Only one percent of a fully grown tree is actually alive at any one time. Most of me is made of wood cells that are no longer living. In many ways, that makes me tougher than you.

It is a great gift indeed to love who you are.

Different languages, different food, different customs. That’s our neighborhood: wild and tangled and colorful. Like the best kind of garden.

“People believe what they wanna believe. About trees.” She stared at the newly carved word. “About people, too.”

I was worried about me, too. I didn’t want to leave the world I loved so much. I wanted to meet next spring’s owl nestlings. I wanted to praise the new maple sapling across the street when it blushed red as sunset. I wanted my roots to journey farther, my branches to reach higher.

But that is how it is when you love life. And I could accept that if my time had come, it had come. After a life as fine as mine, who was I to complain?

In the sweet calm, surrounded by everything I loved—moonlight, air, grass, animals, earth, people—I wondered, with a pang, how much longer I would be able to savor such moments. I wondered, too, if I’d done enough for the world I loved.

I’d done my job. A tree is, after all, just a tree. Like I’d told Bongo: “We grow as we must grow, as our seeds decided long ago.”

the world’s a tough place. Doesn’t matter if you’re a bunny or a lizard or a kid.

I wanted to tell them that friendship doesn’t have to be hard. That sometimes we let the world make it hard.

One by one, the children tied their wishes to me. The principal and assistant principal and janitor and teachers all helped. My boughs had never been more laden. My heart had never been more hopeful. Because as each child, as each neighbor, as each stranger, placed a wish upon me, they looked at Samar and her parents and said the same thing: “STAY.”

“Bongo,” I said in a voice that only she could hear, “you need to get to a safe place. You heard him: I’m a big tree. You don’t want to be in the way when I fall.” “I’m not going anywhere,” she replied in a stubborn whisper. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. But I’m staying with you, Red. And that’s final.”

If this were a fairy tale, I’d tell you there was something magical about that Wishing Day. That the world changed and we all lived happily ever after. But this is real life. And real life, like a good garden, is messy.

Trees can’t tell jokes. But we can certainly tell stories.