Tom and I are heading to Chicago to celebrate two family milestones:
Kirk’s and Jen’s (my son and future daughter-in-law) engagement and Sharon’s (my sister-in-law) retirement from teaching.
While we are away, Poly is sure to keep an eye on things.
See you in June with more stories.
I thought I’d seen it all,
towering above,
connecting parched earth
to every blazing sky
with few monsoon
storms racing by.
But something sinister stirs,
threatening those who dare
to gaze high and pass my
lofty four-generation station
to seek aid and find shade.
I can’t bear the crash,
our tumbling down
never again
to stretch or grow
in our forever dreams.
Yet my weary branches ache,
because I suspect
without our canopy
of truth, strength, and justice
our best days together
will have come and gone.
***
According to the Arizona Forestry and Fire Management Agency, “Mr. Big” is the largest red gum eucalyptus in the U.S. Located in the picturesque desert confines of Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona, he stands 117 feet tall with a circumference of 22 feet. He was planted here as a three-year-old sapling in 1926. A wooden fence and security camera surrounding the base of the tree are designed to discourage thoughtless people from carving their initials in the trunk. On February 6, 2025, I captured this photo of Mr. Big with my husband Tom during our Boyce Thompson visit. Mr. Big’s presence, threats to nature from global warming, and the upheaval in our country have inspired me to write this poem.
Hello Yellow, how good of you
to make an appearance before
Santa and his reindeer land.
I’ve missed you and your
colorful red and orange cousins,
your crunchy-yet-sunny
disposition, your earthly scent
as you hang, glide and tumble
to be collected by the magical
metallic click and swoosh of
yesterday’s backyard garden
rake. Didn’t we once gather
with your friends in a pile or
several for one last heavenly
autumnal celebration before
carols and flurries cascaded and
winter’s drifts and desolation
froze us in our tracks?
Now I remember us together,
surviving in a simpler, more
defined, orderly civilization.
You don’t need to worry.
As long as I am here, you
and your seasonal friends
will remain alive, constant,
distinguishable, and everlasting
… at least in my imagination.
What will happen, when our last
parade of Palo Verde petals
paint the blue sky yellow?
Beyond the frantic flight
of ever-fluttering pages,
who will pause to remember
what we did, what we saw,
what we knew, what we missed,
who we loved and carried forward,
who we–proud and bold–held,
before the blossoms fell?
From time to time, it’s important to take stock of where we’ve been and how we’ve grown. In that spirit, as December’s light wanes, I look back over the fence at 2023.
Here are ten important things–in no particular order–I’ve learned (or been reminded of) this year. Each is connected to one or more blog posts I wrote in the past twelve months.
***
#1: Creative opportunities are rare butterflies; grab them when they appear.
#2: Music transforms the human heart with joy and hope.
#3: Cats are resourceful, cuddly, and conniving characters.
#4: Losing someone you love to suicide is devastating.
#5: Trees keep us rooted to the places we love most.
#6: Good poetry simply IS; no explanations are required.
#7: My husband is a sweet guy, who really knows his movies.
#8: Carol Burnett is a national treasure and a kind human being.
#9: You can’t replace your mother or father, but you can remember them fondly.
#10: We all need a sense of community to connect and nourish our souls.
***
Join me on my blogging adventure in 2024. Just fill out the information on my Contact Me page. I will be sure to add your email address to my subscriber list.
Trees connect us to the earth and sky. They adorn our natural spaces with character, continuity, and shade. Though they never speak, trees–if we listen–whisper wisdom in the wind.
***
Tom and I have missed the presence of a tree in front of our Scottsdale home for nearly six months.
In May, carpenter bees sawed our fifty-year-old fig tree, selected and planted by Tom’s grandfather in the early 1970s.
Sadly, it split in two and tumbled down in the darkness. Only a stump remained for nearly six months.
During the long, hot summer of 2023, I missed the solitude and protection of a tree outside our north-facing window.
Each time I walked past our fig tree’s stump, it reminded me of other recent losses: our friend Dave last December; Frances (my mother’s sister) in July; then another friend Chad … suddenly in September.
Strange as it sounds, the space where our fig tree once stood felt like an open wound or incomplete canvas. But that changed in September when Tom and I shopped for a new tree.
I felt the exuberance of nature’s possibilities as we walked through Moon Valley Nursery in Phoenix–sizing up the options: Hong Kong Orchid (flowers in the spring); Chinese Elm (strong shade tree); Ficus (evergreen and can be trimmed to stay small); and Red Push Pistache (drought-resilient with a pop of color in the late fall).
Jonnie was our escort and sales rep. She helped us compare and contrast the leading candidates. By the end of September, the choice was clear for Tom and me.
We picked the new tree of our dreams, a hearty Red Push Pistache. It is best known for the vivid red color it produces in late November.
In that sense, it will remind us of the Burning Bush we planted in the front yard of our home in Mount Prospect, Illinois in the summer of 2013.
It turned blood red every October (and still provides a splash of color though we left in 2017), after the Blue Spruce that preceded it died in the spring of 2013 … a few months after my mother left this earth.
***
On November 1, a crew from Moon Valley Nursery arrived to remove our fig tree stump. As they dug up the remaining gnarly and decaying roots and hollowed out the hole, Tom and I could feel relief pour in.
The following afternoon, our new, mature, Red Push Pistache tree arrived on the back of a long, flatbed truck. A team of five men from Moon Valley maneuvered it through the gate and down the sidewalk. Moments later, the crew enlarged the hole to accommodate our new tree’s three-foot ball of roots.
By five o’clock they had anchored our durable-and-drought-resistant shade tree in the ground in front of our condo. Soon after, they left to deposit another tree for another customer.
I imagine, in a few weeks–as Tom and I prepare to sit down at our kitchen table and give thanks on a Thursday–our new tree will lavish us with a blaze of red leaves.
But even before the redness appears, it feels as though some semblance of balance, normality, and renewal has returned to reveal our new view in south Scottsdale outside our north-facing window.
Losses and stories come in many forms. This one is best told by my husband Tom, today’s guest blogger.
***
Ode to a Fig Tree
by Tom Samp
When my grandparents moved in 1972 to the Scottsdale condo where Mark and I now live, my grandfather planted a fig tree.
This tree grew and flourished. It was unique and magnificent. It produced sweet purple figs every summer.
There was never a time when this tree wasn’t a part of the condo, and of my memories of my grandparents and parents. The tree became a part of the lore of our condo complex.
Last Friday, a victim of the carpenter bees that nested and chewed slowly through the bark and the wood inside, the tree had literally cracked in half and fell bent to the ground.
The sadness was immediate and deep.
But why feel this way for a tree? It’s only wood, bark, leaves, and, in the summer, sweet purple fruit.
My mourning certainly could not compare to that felt by our friend and neighbor Aggie, whose husband Bill, also our friend, passed away during the week.
Still, it was the sentimental images and feelings I attached to the fig tree that made its death so emotional for me.
It was a part of our home that I almost took for granted. A splash of green we saw when we opened our blinds every morning.
A place for the small birds–sparrows, finches, lovebirds–to wait their turn at the bird feeder we hung right outside our window.
The shady spot where our neighbors Pat and Gary placed their lawn chairs to read or relax; and where Gary took his last breath on Good Friday, 2021.
A topic of awed comment and conversation from friends and passers-by.
An ingredient in the fig jam that our neighbor Jeannie made for us.
The February morning every year, after the leaves all fell for the winter, when Mark and I trimmed the branches way back.
The excitement each April when we saw the tiniest green buds, signifying that the tree had survived, and would again thrive.
A final remnant from my grandparent’s lives, when they pioneered to Scottsdale from Chicago in retirement.
On Saturday, after the condo landscaping crew kindly and efficiently chopped the broken tree and carried away the pieces, Mark created a container garden in its place, filled with colorful flowerpots which held desert plants and cactus.
It will be an adjustment. Maybe we will plant another tree in the fall. In the meantime, the memories will always linger.
Nearly ten years have passed since she passed January 26, 2013.
As this seismic anniversary of my mother’s death approaches, I feel a degree of grief’s numbness reappearing.
The time is right for me to sprinkle this space with reflections on Helen F. Johnson’s life: how much I loved her; what I learned from her; and why I still miss her.
I watched my mother grow in wisdom and shrink in physical presence–simultaneously–in her final ten years.
In those poetic moments–especially 2004 to 2009 when we visited at her condo in Winfield, Illinois–the two observations felt incongruent as we sat side by side on a park bench reflecting on her love of family, nature, photography, and letter writing.
But they don’t anymore.
Now that I’ve surpassed the midpoint of my sixties–favoring the quietest moments of life over all the rest–I see and feel the same transformation happening within me.
I’m far more inclined to record the moments that happen around me, because–like her–I have the time and the interest. She has left me an invaluable gift: a recognizable path and impulse to emulate.
My life has changed immensely since she died. I’ve retired from corporate life, married Tom, moved across the country, survived a heart attack, lost forty pounds, written four books, endured Covid, and built a new life in the desert.
Yet, it is when Tom and I spend time with my sons Nick and Kirk–her only grandchildren–that I am most aware of how long she has been gone and how much she loved us all.
They were both in their twenties in 2013. Searching. Unsettled. Preparing to launch. On the cusp of new personal discoveries and adventures. Since that time, they’ve traveled, found new loves, new jobs, new homes.
Kirk is now nearly 34; Nick almost 39. How she–a lover of plants and trees–would have loved learning that her oldest grandson stopped by our condo last Friday to pluck grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and tangelos from our citrus trees.
Or that Nick coached a Boys and Girls Club basketball team last year.
Or that Kirk traveled to Vanuatu with the Peace Corps in 2014 and more recently has found his counseling stride in a small practice in Chicago … helping patients who’ve experienced some sort of trauma.
Over this past weekend, Tom and I watched Milo and Miley (a friend’s two Shih Tzus) again.
The dogs are sweet, lovable characters. But I needed a little time to escape on Sunday to my thoughts and devices. So, I drove to Chaparral Park and walked around the lake for about an hour.
As I rounded a bend of pine trees which Tom and I love, I spotted an older man. He sat quiet, content, and alone on a park bench.
Seeing him reminded me of the moments my mother cherished in her eighties, pondering the world from a park bench. She could simply sit, enjoy the shade of the trees, read the newspaper or gaze at passersby.
Or she could wonder about the lives of her children and grandchildren … long after she was gone.
February is the shortest sister, who reveals the tallest truths. She is the forsaken, lovelorn link between what was and what may be.
She may look like less, but she will never be more. She prefers to expose what hides in summer’s shadows than to impress with leafy grandeur.
She won’t be bothered with producing figs to entice or dazzle. Those juicy baubles that dangle in gusty monsoons will come soon enough.
She stands and waits outside your door to tell it to you straight: “I am the bare bridge from January to March. I keep the world spinning forward.”
It rained most of September 4, 2021, in eastern Missouri. Fortunately, scattered-but-heavy showers didn’t wash away our plans.
At nine a.m., Tom and I drove north thirty minutes from our room at Hampton Inn Valley Park to visit my cousin Phyllis and her family in their St. Charles, Missouri home.
After we exchanged hugs, Phyllis’ husband Tom prepared homemade blueberry-and-apple pancakes. We volleyed catch-up stories between the kitchen and family room, while their golden retriever Truman sidled up to Tom and me on the couch, placed each of his front paws in our laps, and stole our hearts.
For the next two hours eleven of us–spread across three generations–gathered around a rectangular kitchen table framed by angled windows and a lush backyard.
The two Toms, Phyllis and I represented the senior set. Amanda, Austin, Kelsey, and Bryant smiled and shared stories of their thirty-something, heavy-lifting, career-and-child-rearing years. They shepherded and cradled: three-year-old Ava, who danced around the table in her princess gown; adorable one-year-old Violet, who is learning to walk; and baby Brooks born in July with a head of hair.
It was a treat for me to spend time with them all, the entirety of my Johnson family connection that remains in the St. Louis area.
Thankfully, the reunion around Phyllis’ and Tom’s table superseded our previous encounter at an Italian restaurant in St. Louis on July 5, 2017. It was one day before I suffered a mild heart attack as Tom and I walked to Left Bank Books in St. Louis’ central west end to see my book of light-hearted Missouri stories on the shelf.
***
When we left St. Charles just before noon, I pointed our rental car southeast. Tom typed the address for Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery into his smartphone to find the most direct route to my parents’ graves.
Ironically, our most recent visit to the rolling hills of white marble grave markers on the banks of the Mississippi River was four years ago–the same day we last saw Phyllis and Tom. But on this occasion–September 4–we were in town on what would have been Dad’s and Mom’s seventy-third wedding anniversary.
I had hoped to stop somewhere for a small bunch of flowers to leave on their graves. That never happened. Instead, we arrived at the cemetery entrance empty handed, made two right turns and one left, drove past the chapel, traveled up a hill, and parked our rental car under a tree.
About the time we arrived, the rain paused. We walked a hundred steps or so to DD 355, where Dad and Mom are buried near a large oak tree. As Tom and I surveyed the grounds and knelt quietly, he spotted two acorns side-by-side on top of the wet grass on Mom’s side of the marker.
Before we left, I placed the acorns on top of the marker in honor of their wedding anniversary.
I suppose even in the solemn solitude of a cemetery the strength of our family ties endure and life goes on.
Mark Johnson Stories 