An act of will

A Few Words

By Renae Bottom

To grow a tree, when and where it’s wanted, is an act of will.

Volunteer trees don’t count. They root in the most inconvenient places—flowerbeds, building foundations, quarter-inch cracks in the sidewalk. But to nurture a stand of trees, deliberately placed, is to pit oneself against the granite face of nature.

A battle like that requires a person like my mother. She succeeded at it, long before weed barrier strips and drip irrigation were common practice.

The vertical reach attained by trees my mother has willed to maturity eclipse her 5-foot frame by a factor of 100. Photographs from the early 1950s show our farmstead as a barn and a house rising up from a barren yard. No shelter belt, no shade trees to speak of, nothing to baffle the wind or mottle the sunshine.

Then my mother arrived. She planted, weeded, watered and willed. I can still see her with her spade, turning up ground at the base of the cedar trees west of our house. She encircled the seedlings with reclaimed tractor or car tires for protection.

 After planting Ponderosa pines north of the house, she rigged a 30-gallon tank to our Red Flyer wagon, filled it at the windmill each day and ferried water to those trees. On her hands and knees, she pulled Texas sand burs from the rows, along with any weeds that threatened to choke out the fledgling objects of her will.

I helped, but not without coercion. I was too busy roaming around, checking for rabbit warrens in the orchard or errant ducks floating on the runoff water in the draw. I had no patience for daily work. 

Not so my mother. She was clear-headed. She reigned over the daily. If incremental effort, day after day, was the key to success, no one could defeat her.

She once decided to paint the house. I found her, sitting on a paint-splattered bucket, wearing her floppy hat and cotton gloves, brushing white exterior latex onto our wooden siding.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Painting the house,” she answered.

“How will you do that?” I persisted, looking at the five square feet she had completed.

“A little bit each day,” she said, and kept brushing. Simple as that.

And she did it. We all pitched in of course—my siblings and I weren’t barbarians, and neither was our father—but it was her project. I wonder, is her sort of determination a factor of personality? A product of upbringing? A value instilled in the Greatest Generation? I don’t know.

I do know that her approach beats back all fear. I will win, it says, because I understand the battle won’t be over today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. It will be over when I stop, and I won’t stop. Ever.

I grew up a chronic non-finisher. I grew up with a head full of ideas, but no structured mechanism for working them out. I grew up needing a mom, exactly like the one I got.

She exerted a quiet force of will that sheltered our family. To say she nurtured us is too quaint. She sustained us, and in large part grew us up, by the steady, incremental love she poured into us, day after day.

To grow a child is an act of will. Purposed good will—the stubborn kind—is perhaps the most irresistible force known to humankind. It produces the bedrock of confidence and love we need to support life.

My mother was good at the daily. She willed us to maturity. And she won.