Original Art by Melissa Jordan Willis

Tilted

The spray from the hose boomerangs into my face. The westerlies are blowing again and I’m watering the wind-dried annuals under the mystery tree. I call it that because unlike most of the yard’s plants that have nursery tags, the mystery tree erupted from the soil of its own volition, perplexing me from the first. A few seasons back, at the base of a sun-bleached ironbark stump, it emerged in the form of a willowy sapling.

I’m not what you’d call an expert on the binomial nomenclature system, but I do get a little linguistic rush when reading the botanical names and common monikers on labels and seed packets. I find power in a name, in identity. Knowledge. Aesthetics. History. Proper care and feeding. What to expect in the future. I want to know who this stranger is on my land and how big is it going to get?

Labels, diagnoses, etymologies; I’m always searching for a cause, an origin or classification. Like when Coop, my second born failed to develop on schedule—Autism, okay—now I know what to do. Speech therapy, special schools, a psychiatrist for me. Or when I get a follow on Instagram, but their account is private. Who are you?! Show yourself! Am I being hacked? But the mystery tree is still a mystery, and I drive around town looking for some of its cousins, hoping for some enlightenment. The plant identification app everyone suggests is wrong, that much I know. I am learning to live in the “unknowing”.

I admire its slender, blue-green leaves, alternately placed, not opposite. A clue. 

I think of beauty, of nature’s genius, of symmetry. In my life things are crooked. My body is misshapen; my breasts hang too low, my eyes too close together. My Mom is bent over, her spine bowed like a tree limb carrying overripe fruit. My cat’s tail is kinked at the end like the letter zee. 

Symmetrical facial features are associated with beauty and health, and evolutionary psychologists suggest these traits trigger mating signals that cause arousal, our desire then influencing our selections. But the classical definition of beauty is thankfully being challenged now, and people are learning to question their primal programming. Skin care companies have heeded the clarion call for the inclusion of diverse forms of loveliness. Laugh lines are the remnants of a joyful life. Stretch marks are the beautiful etchings of bearing a child. A tilted tree is the proclamation of the will to live.

The mystery tree is fifteen feet tall now, tilted to the east and lopsided, like most trees in our desert corridor. The wind gusts are funneled through the San Gorgonio Pass and cause cenizo shrubs to bend in supplication, honey mesquites to grow hunchbacked. My efforts at pruning and shaping were in vain. It resents the wind and knows better than to battle it. Its branches sprout to the east, like arms reaching for a lover.

I still don’t know what species the mystery tree is, but I’m moved by the way it sways in the breeze. And my mother Betty is achingly beautiful as she looks to me from her ninety-one year old cocoa-brown eyes.  I love my bent-tailed rescue cat Ziggy, and—on a good day—my imperfect self.