There are these tiles in the bathroom at work, that have beige and brown swirling patterns on them. I think they're suppose to mimic real stone, but they fall short of the mark. However, if you unfocus your eyes a little you can see pictures in the stone pattern - a squirrel perched, a bird cleaning his feathers, a head tossed back and laughing.
Today, it made me suddenly remember the pine trees.
The house I grew up in had this wall of pine trees, separating our yard from our neighbours. This was no tame hedge, these were behemoths. To a small child, they seemed impossibly tall and impossibly skinny, reaching up into the heavens, as if they would suddenly buckle under the weight of their own branches, admit defeat, and bow down to the ground.
My parents' bedroom, with its massive picture window, looked directly across the yard towards the pines, lined up like imperfect soldiers. When I got sick or wasn't feeling well, I would be tucked up in their bed with a book - which became problematic in later years when they painted their entire bedroom the colour of a deep peach. It was like being inside a pale pumpkin, which does not help a nauseous stomach to settle down and go to sleep. Regardless, usually whatever illness was afflicting me made it difficult to read, my eyes got tired quickly and refused to focus. So I would stare at the pines.
Few things in life, then or since, have made me feel as singularly calm as watching those pines. They were tall enough to always catch the wind, even if it there was only a small breeze, but it made them sway like drunken dancers against each other. I would watch them until figures emerged from the branches. You could only catch them for a second, as a branch moved just so to form the perfect image of a dragon in flight, before they swayed away and the image was gone. Dragons, turtles, tea pots, a flock of birds... Those pines asked nothing, grew contentedly on their own, and yet they provided the perfect pallet for an imagination to draw out whatever shapes and images you could desire.
I was devastated when we sold that house, I think it was a beautiful place to grow up, but more than the house, the walls, the stone fireplace... I would give anything to have those pines back.
Closing my eyes brings them vividly into relief, but there's a funny thing with memory. Sitting in bed, sick and imagining, I let my eyes unfocus in order to stop seeing the details of the branches and instead see the images between them. Now, I can see the trees perfectly in my mind, can even watch them swaying with the wind, but the details are fuzzy, the branches are just branches, and the images aren't there. They are just trees, pines that grew at the house I used to live in.
