By Edie Everette / Herald Forum
I have decided to leave this world via a weeping mulberry tree.
This tree “never gets too big” and produces “small, sweet, one-inch-long dark, black berries.” It is a fast-growing, ornamental tree native to China. The white berry variety is illegal to plant in Tucson, Ariz., Las Vegas and El Paso, Texas, because of its talent to invade, although you wouldn’t want to plant it because the white berries resemble maggots.
Olive and Wilber Jones had a grown weeping mulberry tree (from now on referred to as WMT) in their yard until it was cut down in the early 1980s by an architect who bought the property. Olive and Wilber were my grandparents who, besides their WMT had a giant Gravenstein apple tree whose fruit made the best pies ever.
A female WMT grows to up to seven feet tall, the point at which its branches turn downward to weep for me and thee. There is a Bible verse found in Luke 17:6 that states: “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” This is all dang poetic because Grandma Jones wore a bracelet and earrings set wherein each earring held a mustard seed inside of a glass orb, while another such orb with a mustard seed inside of it hung from the bracelet’s chain.
As children, my mother Cleopatra and her younger sister Reva picked the WMT’s long, black berries and crushed them to make sweet, purple juice to sell to passersby. This was during the Great Depression when the sisters cut inserts out of cardboard to lengthen the lives of their shoes while their mother Olive prepared delicious meals with an onion and a couple potatoes.
The thing about WMTs is that once grown, they create a circular “room” within. Their leafy, weepy branches produce a thick curtain around an enclosure that features a dusky, dirt floor and a twisty-trunk center column. My best friend Barbara and I, as kids, considered this a dwelling of our own, an earthy place that adults were not interested in. It was a space where I felt like a person separate from my parents. It was a place that held mystery, like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden.”
Two years ago, I purchased a young, foot-tall WMT and planted it in the side yard. I wanted to recreate a secret room so that, in future, children may experience it the way I did. The tree is growing healthy and strong, with spikey starter berries on its branches. I am not sure how long it will take for it to grow into a room, but I hope not super long because I have a plan.
I recently re-watched Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” a film from 1975 based on a novel. (You may watch the entire beautiful movie on dailymotion.com.) In the film, which helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema, a small group of all-female college students go on a Valentine’s Day outing to Hanging Rock. Set at the turn of the 20th century, the girls wear modest white dresses, thick black stockings and straw hats. They picnic and nap at the base of the forbidding rock until three of the girls and their chaperone hike up into the rock’s crags and disappear without a trace; a mystery that is never solved.
This is my plan: When I am very old, I shall wear a long, white nightgown that matches my cropped, white hair. I will walk barefoot to my side yard to behold the WMT that has finally grown into a room. I will raise my hand to part its curtain and duck to step inside. Like the other-worldly Miranda in “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” should someone call for me to come back I will ignore them, prepared to vanish into thin air.
Edie Everette is an artist and writer living in the Snohomish County’s Sky Valley.
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