What the Wintergreen Tree Taught Me
I couldn’t remember, for years
The rocky, eroded cart road climbs a steep slope. As I lean into it and focus on one step at a time, I picture a horse-drawn wagon navigating this angle. More recently, heavy equipment for logging used this road, tearing out the edges of the narrow track and chewing up the ground.
With backpacks and metal detectors slung over our shoulders, my brother Rob and I are headed to the remains of a four-acre square field, delineated by stone walls, on top of the hill. We don’t talk as we huff up the incline. Our destination is a small cellar hole on one side of the field, indicating a dwelling that wasn’t on the map after 1855.
Upon arrival, we find the tracks of the now absent machines scrolling across the muddy, icy ground, like the cursive script of giants. The field has been cleared of most trees and vegetation by the loggers. This is a mixed blessing; the underbrush is gone, but now, in January, much of the exposed ground has frozen hard.
Our metal detectors hear few intriguing signals. Someone else has searched here before us. We still find parts of stories: the remains of a modernish cabin in the far corner, where the view would’ve been best before the trees grew in, freshly emptied pill packets tossed on the ground (when I look up the medication later at home, I learn it is akin to methadone), and shotgun shells. These aren’t the stories we’re looking for, but they’re all woven into this field, along with us.
If you’re less than ten years old, four wooded acres feels like a kingdom, vast, and mysterious. At the house I grew up in, my parents’ lot was four acres, and beyond it, more woods unfolded, where myself and my three siblings could roam, unsupervised.
Sometimes my Dad would ramble with us, pointing out various natural elements along the way. Minerals in rocks. The leaves of Lady Slippers, before they bloomed. And the wintergreen tree.
He showed us how to break off a small thin branch, split it into two (thus peeling off the bark), and chew on the green cambium underneath, which had a pleasing wintergreen scent and taste.
I would do this all the time when I was a child, and proudly show my friends the magic as well. And then, somehow, I forgot. And later, after more education, I even forgot I forgot. Until one recent day in the woods, I remembered to ask myself—what tree is the wintergreen tree?
I did not know. All I could recall was dark thin branches with delicate leaf buds. This felt like a failing on my part. I’d held something important in my pocket, then lost it. And my father is gone now, recently deceased.
After hours of fruitless scouring around the old farm, Rob gets his detector over one beautiful signal, a high, clear tone that sings “coin-coin-coin” to our ears. Up from the cold ground comes a 1787 copper coin in excellent condition, produced in Connecticut before any federal United States mint existed. We pass it back and forth in excitement, wondering aloud how someone else didn’t find it before us.
A bit later, while I am standing by the cellar hole, pausing for a moment to eat a snack, and to feel and listen, to tune into the place—its history, birdsong, and even the air, which smells like mud and newly broken pine tree limbs—I see a tree. I look at it.
It’s been spared from cutting—marked with a blue blaze, along with a scant handful of other trees. Growing out of the side of the cellar, with mottled dark and light bark, it’s slender, with the finest little end branches holding tiny leaf buds. Something inside of me says that is the wintergreen tree. Not a memory—more like knowing rising from the depths.
I don’t trust myself, my seeing. I break off a small twig, and split it into two. I smell the sweet clean green and give it a nibble.
Yes. This is the wintergreen tree.
I point it out to my brother. He understands what I’m talking about.
Just after the New Year, my yoga teacher read something in class which made me weep. I think of the poem as I stand in the field, pondering the day’s mysteries. I learned something there, in that four acres; nothing is lost. Not me, my Dad, or the wintergreen tree. Because, as the yogi’s poem gently proclaims—
Everything good in your life is still here, everything good is still available to you.