Today we continue to share essays from the Loft’s Mother Words class. Gretchen Sage-Martinson shares how she’s learned to see the world through her son’s optimistic point of view.

“And that one is up”

Last year I was out driving somewhere the day after a big storm had swept through the area. I had my two year old son in the back seat. He was babbling away to himself as usual. We pulled off the highway and drove through a section of St. Paul that had many trees down. For some reason this really hurt me. Seeing those destroyed trees, roots pulled completely free from the ground, made it hard for me to breathe. “Oh Theo, look at all the trees that are down!” I whined to my small child. In the rear view mirror I saw him lift his tiny chin so that he could see out the window. “Oh Mommy, but look, that one is up, and that one is up.” Honestly, for the next 5 minutes Theo continued to point out every tree he saw standing tall. Then he went back to mumbling, but he managed to lift my spirits.

Theo has always been an optimistic sort. Any kind of wipe out or injury is followed by him standing up, dusting off his hands, and declaring, “I’m better now!” Occasionally, I have noticed that he has declared this even before he hits the ground. Last week he was at the Omni Theater with his grandparents. The movie was about bears, and at one point a cub takes a pretty tough tumble out of a tree it had been trying to climb. Theo’s little voice rang out with “Well, that’s one way to get down!” and the theater erupted in laughter. At the YMCA today, Theo was playing in the kiddie pool. They have four jets of water that shoot up from the shallow end. Theo enjoyed sitting on them. Then he tried to give one a hug. Of course he toppled right over and got a forceful jet of water to the face. He came back, eyes red, nose dripping, but a smile on his face. He sat down next to me, put his little hand on my leg, looked into my eyes and said, “Well, that’s one way to get a drink of water!”

This summer it’s our back yard tree that is hurting. It hasn’t been toppled in a storm, but our weary damp cold spring got the best of it. The poor maple developed some sort of fungal rot. Its leaves develop rusty spots that grow bigger and bigger until they caused the leaves to curl up and drop from the tree. This has distressed me to no end. I love the shade that this tree gives my family. We are constantly under its cool branches in the summer time. And in the fall, when you look out at it from the second floor window, it is like you are standing within the core of a fire. It is brilliant. The thought of going through the rest of the summer with just empty bows has brought me down. I have even taught my older son how to identify other trees with “ye olde rot” as we call it. As we drive or bike around town, he and I alert each other to trees that have succumb to ye olde rot. I just noticed that Theo has never joined in on this scavenger hunt. So tonight, as I was mowing the lawn, I stopped beneath the maple. I looked up between its half empty branches. Instead of concentrating on the bare spots, I looked up and said to myself, “Well, that leaf is there, and that one is still there, and that one…”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:25 am and is filed under Main, Mother Words Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.