OCTOBER 4, 2020 –
Yesterday I spent all day in my “tree garden” in the back woods of our family’s lakeside retreat in northwestern Wisconsin. With the advance of fall, countless pine seedlings are now visible across the acreage that was logged several years ago. For months I’ve been trimming brush and poplar shoots around the seedlings to enhance their growth prospects next spring.
In a glade of hardwoods left by the loggers, I encountered a whole commune of young white pine. I staked them with small orange flags so they’ll be easier to find next month when I staple bud caps on my “inventory” of over 800 small white pine. (The “caps” are squares of paper fastened around the leader buds to protect them from browsing deer.) In the course of staking, I discovered a three- to four-year-old balsam fir struggling to grow around a weathered log. I imagined it as a little princess lost in the woods. This triggered instantly . . . a memory.
A balsam once grew in the yard outside our family’s cabin. Amidst all the wild pine, the symmetrical elegance of the balsam stood out like royalty. It hugged the edge of the steep embankment rising from the lake, and from its perch it enjoyed a sweeping view of its lacustrian kingdom.
My dad would pluck a few needles from it, crush them in his hand, then hold them out to me. “Smell how fragrant they are,” he’d say. I’d take a deep sniff and hold my breath as long as I could. There was no finer aroma among flowers.
For a long time, that balsam was the only one of its kind around. Dad told me that years before when the tree was a little “princess”—a seedling about the size of the one I encountered today—my grandmother had discovered it deep in the woods that surround the cabin. She’d transplanted it to the yard, and there it flourished for 25 or 30 years.
Several years after my grandmother died, the tree died, and I imagined that it did so from grief. But just as her legacy thrives, so flourish the progeny of that balsam. Many are now scattered hundreds of feet from the “throne” occupied by Queen Balsam the First. (On a trip to my grandmother’s childhood home in Småland, Sweden, Dad found some fir seeds. He cultivated a seedling, then transplanted it to the very place where that balsam grew. Now a mature tree, the Swedish fir thrives . . . as do memories of Dad and my grandmother.)
Whenever I’m walking with our young granddaughter and encounter a balsam, I’ll emulate Dad, pluck a balsam sprig, crush the needles, then hold them out to Illiana—“Smell these,” I’ll say. And she’ll sniff and say, “Ahhh. Nice!” On her next visit to the cabin, I’ll take her on a hike to the little princess balsam I discovered today, and I’ll tell her the story of her great-grandmother and Queen Balsam the First.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
