The Cherry Tree By Jad Kaado

Listen

She yelled out Edward’s name with conviction as she ran across the newly paved road towards her childhood friend.  It was hot outside, which disturbed Edward, as he wanted to spend his summer break sprawled out in his basement with a Nintendo Switch controller in one hand and his newly purchased Android running Discord in his other.  He kept his head down, using his cap as a cover from the sunlight, as he watched the heat emanating from the asphalt like snakes dancing to an enchanter’s tune. 

Nelly immediately hugged Edward upon arrival. “You look like crap” she said, never mincing her words, especially with her friends. “And you’re not even dressed properly for hiking!”  Ed looked down at his scraggly self, old sweats and beaten down sneakers, and compared himself to Nelly’s well put together outfit.  He had never really been on a hike nor ever really owned a pair of hiking boots, so when Nelly urged him to trek out with her to the forest, he hesitantly agreed.  In fact, if it was another one of his friends – like Josh, Steve, or Jose – Ed would most likely still be sleeping.  However, Ed knew that he would go to the ends of the Earth for Nelly and he could not resist her invitation for hiking out into the woods.

“It’s only a couple miles away from here,” Nelly stated as they were walking along.  He shot her a look but was quickly swayed when he saw her smile.  After a bit, they reached a dirt path at the foot of a clearing near the main road of their town.  “We’ll go down this way and head towards the forest,” she said excitedly.  “It’s about a half mile or so before we arrive at the cherry trees!”

Ed had a confused look on his face.  “Cherry trees? I never knew that we had them around here,” he asked as they trotted down the dirt road.  She turned around at him with another gleaming smile from her face.  “My grandmother used to play there a lot when she was a kid,” Nelly continued. “This is the first-time mom is letting me go to it alone.”  Ed blushed as Nelly burst out laughing.  “There’s also something really cool there I want to show you.” 

“What’s that?” Ed responded, still nervous. “Grandma told me that if we listen really carefully to them, the trees will talk,” she answered.   He glanced at her with slight disapproval and let out a chuckle.

Before they knew it, a downpour of rain fell upon them like pins rattling a window at full speed. Ed shouted in surprise, as he felt cudgeled by each rain drop.  Nelly laughed again, grabbed his hand, and began running with Ed towards their destination. “The cherry trees aren’t far from here. Let’s use them as cover from the rain.”

They quickly made their way along the muddy path as fast as they could, hand in hand, until they reached the forest. Nelly stopped her running and let go of Ed, looking around the forest as she caught her breath.  Emotions poured through her soul faster than the rain was sliding off each tree leaf. A grin appeared on her face.

“Nell! Over here!” shouted Ed against the downpour and whistling winds between the branches of trees. He was huddled against a very tall tree, desperately trying to get under the leaves to shield himself from the rain.

“No!” Nelly shouted, regaining her breath. She took a second to think. “Not that one, this tree over here!” Nelly ran through to the opposite end of the forest and disappeared from Ed’s sight.  He let out a grunt, not wanting to run out again in the rain, but that was Nelly. He loved how certain she was about her decisions and followed through what he perceived to be the path that she took with no questions asked.

The rain clouds tamed the sun, distilling Ed’s vision as he walked around each individual tree. They were taller and bushier than he expected, as he kept bumping into the trunks and tripping on the roots while trying to find his friend.

“Over here you klutz!” She shouted towards Ed.  He looked up to find a small clearing within the middle of the forest but could not find Nelly.  “Over here, to your left!” she shouted again.  He glanced around in that direction and saw her hugging a much smaller tree.  He hopped across the clearing and approached her and the tree with some timidity. 

“Come here,” Nelly gently prodded as she grabbed his hand and placed it on the trunk of the tree. “Listen.” She placed her ear against the trunk of the Cherry Tree, while still holding onto him, and smiled. He paused for a moment, thinking about what she meant by that command, and followed suit. He leaned in, gently moving his ear on to the trunk. It was a coarse, yet wet feeling, attacking his ear, sending goosebumps along down his neck and spine. Ed was not pleased with being this intimate with nature, but he noticed Nelly’s face, and how peaceful she was in that rainy moment.

“Do you hear it?” she asked. Ed stayed silent and pushed his ear even closer to the trunk. He took a deep breath, letting go of all his preconceptions of the world around.  And it was then, at that moment, a symphonic cacophony of sounds attenuated through his ear. Ed and Nelly glanced at each other, smiling, like giddy children with a conch shell on an empty beach, as familiar tones began to form into words, solely within the confines of their hearts and minds.

***

Connect

Three summers passed since Edward first heard the words of their rooted friend. He was excited to come back and see both Giris and Nelly.  Ed spent his time between classes thinking about eir words, histories, and songs of ancient times and long forgotten, all while discussing them with Nelly, which was his favorite part. 

He approached the side of the busy road, where he first walked down with Nelly, and picked up pieces of a broken beer bottle.  He placed the shards in a bag he was carrying and walked down the path towards the forest.  The sun was at its peak, accompanied with a mild breeze that softly brushed up against Ed’s face, creating a smile.  He walked down admiring the luscious greenery that lined the pathway, flowering colors of pink, purple, and red dotting the fields while bees danced from one style to another.

Ed’s senses were overwhelmed with the smell of cherries when he entered the familiar forest.  The trees stood tall and proud, covering the sky with burly branches clothed in forest green.  Various shades of red were scattered throughout the canopy of the forest, each individual fruit at a different point in their life, with their own stories to tell.  The road was also littered with many cherries that stained Ed’s shoes as he increased his pace. It was the season for cherry picking, and so generous was the forest this year, that the people in the town could not catch up with the plentiful bounty of the forest.

Ed saw Nelly lounged in front of Giris, next to a large basket filled to the brim with cherries, laughing as she always did.  She was seated on a blanket in her sky-blue dress and black flats, with her notebook by her side, while Ed began setting up his art supplies.  

“Sorry I’m late,” said Ed as he approached them both.  “Hey Giris!”  Ed jumped up quickly and walked over to Giris, also giving eir a hug. He then crouched down beside Nelly, kissing her and she hugged him. Ed admired Giris’s face, wrinkled up with years of wisdom reminiscent of an old man, revealing the dentrified tree’s age, if one looked close enough. Nelly and Ed spent hours over the years sketching images of em, writing down the stories ey told, asking the old tree every question that came to mind about what ey may have witnessed. 

The tree carried ancient knowledge deep within eir xylem, scores of stories waiting to be told to those who would listen. Edward and Nelly developed a bond with the nature around them in order to do so.  They valued their time with Giris and couldn’t think of anyone better to spend their one year together with than their old friend.

“Now that we’re about to go to college, what advice would have you for us?” she asked her friend, as Ed continued to sketch.  Nelly recently confirmed her acceptance letter with the University of Pennsylvania and had already enrolled in environmental science and ecology courses for her first year.

“When it comes to both of you, my friends, stay connected in some way or form. When apart from each other, remember the times spent when you were one and how it brought you to where you are. But when you are together, be together in constant dance, moving together against the winds.  But dance not within in the streets of the city, nor great halls, ancient forests, nor even your own home.  Dance, instead, within the hearts and minds of each other.  Do so and keep gaze upon your partner’s eyes, for that is how the soul is formed.”

Ed stopped sketching and drooped his head down ruminating on what the tree was telling them both.  Edward knew that Nelly would probably not come back, as did most of the townspeople who left away.  Who would blame her?  He knew he would leave too if the escape route presented itself, but his father needed him to manage the store while he went to art school part time.

Recently, his father picked up a new job at Fulton Energy Supply as a service operator. It paid almost triple what they were making from the family store, as residents dwindled every year in their town.  An opportunity like this for a lifelong local was rare, and quickly became an easy decision for his father to make. 

Ed looked at Nelly, admiring how studious she was when jotting down her observations when talking with Giris. Her hand moved seamlessly across the page as she never broke eye contact with the tree.  Nelly once showed Ed a couple of pages in the book.  The amount of detail astounded him, from the description of the tree, to verbatim quotes with a lengthy analysis of what eir was preaching.  It was like reading a textbook during one of his homeroom sessions in school, but much more entertaining than what he was taught. He wondered if she ever wrote about him within those notes.

***

Congress

The local administrative building, which was once a chapel a few decades back, was filled to the brim with local farmers and town folk listening to a man talk in a fancy suit.  He stood with an entourage of other suits, and constantly pointed at a large sign next to him containing graphs. The gentleman, introduced to the town as Fenton Harcourt, was analyzing the potential job growth market that Fulton Energy would achieve, once they were able to purchase natural reserves land next to the town. 

“You see,” Harcourt said, “Your area sits within a bountiful reservoir of natural gas that will make each and everyone one of you rich.  Due to regulations, we can’t use regular hydraulic fracturing outside of the town, so we developed a new technology called uBerFracking that will be used in our designated new target zones outside the town perimeters.  If you vote to let us purchase this land from your township, we can work without having to disrupt anyone’s lives or their properties.  It’s really a win-win for the entire town, especially since anyone who’s able is guaranteed to have a job with Fulton.” 

“Will it affect our overall health?” yelled out a random person from the audience.  Harcourt laughed. “No, our new technology of uberFracking involves state of the art drilling wells – developed in Europe - that will help us get the job done twice as fast as previous technologies would work.  Our tests have proved that is safe for uBerFracking near towns.”

The town hall went quiet again.  Ed sat there anxiously, looking around most of his neighbors, who were pondering what the man in the fancy suit was saying.  In recent years, the economy was near shambles and the residents began to dwindle down to a staggering couple hundred at most, the majority of whom were already employed by Fulton.  Ed didn’t like Fulton and definitely wasn’t falling for their empty pitches -especially after they refused to pay his father’s medical bills.  They sent a high-powered lawyer, who vouched for the company, stating that there was no real correlation between his father’s cancer and consistently working at the fracking wells, claiming instead that it was a pre-existing genetic condition.  That’s all the judge really needed to hear.

Once Harcourt finished his presentation, the suits filed back into their seats one by one, like baby geese following their mother in almost perfect unison.  The town council president let out a slight cough before speaking.  “Ok, now that we heard Mr. Harcourt and Fulton’s closing statements on the matter, we’ll move on to Mr. and Mrs. Russell, and then have the vote afterwards.”

Ed focused in on Nelly’s parents as they got up to speak at the podium, dressed as a professionally as they could for modest farmers.  He hadn’t seen them this dressed this way since Nelly’s graduation a few years back.  Her mother was holding a large stack of paperwork in her arms.  Mrs. Russell leaned into the microphone.  “Our daughter Nelly has provided us here with data from her research project about the impact that uBerFracking is having in different environments in our country.  And none of it is good.  Yes, you may create jobs at Fulton, yes you may be turning a profit for some, but the majority of the employees that you and other gas companies employ are showing a staggering rise in cancer diagnoses.  Even worse, there are recorded incidents of increase gases making their way into water supplies and even blowing up a few houses near previous target zones.” Mrs. Russell paused and look around the council chambers.

“Now, I’ve shown you enough of this evidence, and it’s up to all of you to make that decision. The last thing we need is more problems in this town and more people wanting to leave. Is it worth all the money we could potentially get?” she asked.  Mr. Russell began handing out a bunch of fliers to everyone in the room to read over before the vote would take place. 

The town council president looked at his watching hurriedly and belted out,  “The council will take a fifteen-minute recess before we begin the voting process.”  Everyone got up from their chairs and congregated around the chambers, with some rushing out to the smoking areas up front and the bathrooms.  Ed and the Russells made eye contact with each other as they walked back to their seats, a whirlwind of concerns flowing through their minds.

***

Nuance

It wasn’t long before the drills came, and the well sites put up. They lined the outskirts of the town, like a medieval army placing an embargo on a village, each well a trebuchet, readying to fire down upon the castle.  However, there were no castles within this town, but rather serfs moving around vigorously, ready to crack the earth below them, releasing the primeval gas into the modern world.

The streets were filled with various trucks of all sizes, carrying everything from mechanical parts to water tanks and vats of chemicals.  Most of the vehicles were riddled with hazardous material warning signs.  Since the idea was that uBerFracking would take half the time to extract the gas, it would require at least twice the material.  With each month that went by, and with each well that was set up, more vehicles appeared on the road. 

Ed despised driving around the town. He remembered when he first got a car and would take Nelly and his friends around for joy rides, driving out past the county lines late at night after curfew.  How much different and fun it was back in his youth.  Now, instead, it was a lot of traffic, but a different type of congestion. Ed would have to leave an hour or so earlier from home to get to the shop most days, as there were constant oversize hauls taking up time and space on the main roads.   

He pulled over to the side of the road at the usual space.  There was a tractor trailer parked on the shoulder, idling for what looked like to be more than the three minutes allotted by state law.  Bursts of smoking were blasting out of the exhaust pipes while the engine kept running. Ed got out of the car to see if the driver was in the truck, only to find an empty seat.  Luckily, the window was open.  He quickly looked around to see if the driver was in the vicinity, and then hopped up the steps, quickly turning off the engine. 

Pissed off, he walked down the now barely visible path to visit his friend.  As he grew older with age, his visits to Giris became less frequent, once every couple of weeks or so.   It was tougher for him to hike as he once did.  His knees started getting weaker sometime after his forty-seventh birthday, and working at the market full time wasn’t helping, especially since he primarily worked by himself.  Occasionally, one of the neighbor’s kids would help him on the weekend, but they were going to move away at the end of the month.  Many of the residents left, as the number of fracking wells increased over time, with fewer than fifty or so residents remaining.  Even though there were no official records of anything, people started to experience a lot of respiratory symptoms and opted to move out rather than trying to advocate to the local council, which barely met publicly anymore.

He waddled along the pathway, looking around at all the garbage that littered the fields.  It was once filled with an array of beautiful colors, thriving across a vibrant sea of green.  But now, instead, it become a de-facto garbage drop off.  Most of the town amenities were cut down from the budget, considering the decrease in population and the little to no taxes charged to the residents.  Instead, the mayor and council assigned different spots around the town for people to drop off their trash and recycling.  This was one of those spots, and as Ed could attest to from week to weeks, it was not maintained well, especially since the community clean ups stopped a few years back.

He finally ended up at the cherry tree forest, catching his breath at the periphery.  Ed looked up at the once strong trees, noticing how feeble they had gotten.  The branches were much thinner, like dilapidated electrical wires barely hanging on to their posts.  The leaves, now dry and crumbling, flapped around in the cool breeze, like ripped fliers stapled poorly on street poles.  The cherries themselves, once plumpand bright with life, were now shells of their former selves, small shadows hiding within the folds of the leaves.

Ed’s disappointment about the cherries was different than most.  He understood the amount of the work it would take the trees to produce them, and watching the fruit deteriorate was watching a life deteriorate.  His communication with Giris provided a different perspective on the trees’ labor, as well as well their roles within the larger community. 

“You literally are the last person to truly understand me,” Giris coughed out as Ed hugged him.  Ed chuckled, responding, “It doesn’t take much to understand a cherry tree.  All you have to do is listen.” The tree kept coughing. Every year it was getting harder to make out Giris’ features.  Eir face had dried up over the years, as the bark on eir trunk started flaking off like the ashes of a halfway lit cigarette.  Only eir knotty eyes remained the most visible of Giris, while eir mouth began fading to a small opening, muffling the sounds of the ancient tree when talking.

 Ed felt a wave of depression hit him. Each cough Giris belted out resonated through Ed’s memories of his father. He tried remembering the first time his father began coughing harshly but had no luck. It was so many years ago and he was so young.  Ed probably did not even really notice it at first.

“Are you alright my friend?” asked Ed, while Giris kept coughing.  The old tree blinked eir eyes and cleared eir throat with all the strength eir had left.

“I’ll be fine, even though I feel like I’m being strangled,” ey responded.  Ed paused and looked at his friend.  “Who’d want to strangle a cherry tree now? A bunch of uBerFrackers?”  Giris laughed again, followed by a few more coughs.

“Your kind rarely make me laugh these days.  But there is one thing I never understood that I always wondered about.” Giris stopped in reflection.  Ed stood there waiting as he began clearing up some of the plastic wrappers that made its way to the forest.  “Well?” he calmly asked.

“The small details of things, and how they fit in the larger puzzle of the world.” Giris retorted.  Ed belted out another laugh and responded, “We, Americans, never really had a sense for nuance. Why would you wonder about that now?”

“If only they understood these nuances you speak of.” For a moment, Giris seemed like his usual self, which momentarily paused Ed’s tidying around eir feeble roots. “You see, life begins with a simple movement, like a vibration, coming from deep below the ground and rushing throughout the world like small birds discovering flight for the first time.  It is this movement, this shaking, that connects us all together, an intricate quilt of life surrounding the earth.  But, to have this quilt keep the babe warm, one must wrap it gently around him allowing a perfect balance for the cold not to enter. All life on Earth is like this, each individual sown together by the great spirits from afar, so that we may warm each other.  Yet in my life span, as the years went on, it became much colder, and much more imbalanced. I fear for what is to come, to my kind at least.”

He looked quietly at his friend, who was beginning to tire out from their conversations.  Ed remembered how he and Nelly would spend hours with Giris, how vibrant eir used to be.  Now, instead there was a large hole in Ed’s heart, one longing to be filled.  Yet deep down inside he knew, it was about to get worse.  Ed picked up the remainder of the trash that was laying next to his feet, and slowly walked away from his friend.  Giris closed his eyes to rest like a sleeping child nestled nearby the base of a fireplace.  This was the last time Ed spoke with Giris.