The Pine
Standing tall and narrow for its size, almost a third of this tree was well above the surrounding black poplars, white poplars, sometimes better known as aspen, and the few birches interspersed. It was the wise eldest amongst in this boreal forest.
It stretched from its lowest hanging boughs that touched the earth straight upwards into the more often than not clear blue prairie sky. The boughs above the deciduous tree line could not be more perfect, as only nature would permit, culminating in the most elegant of pinnacles.
It was visible from the crown of the hill to the south, where the line of saskatoon berry trees contended with the winds and bore the fruit that we were always sent to pick every summer. It was easily noticed from the hill to the north, where the Ukrainian Orthodox church with its five brilliant gold domes proudly stood and the cemetery stretched out. It was seen from the farms that dotted the landscape and fields of ripened gold wheat that swayed with the breeze near the North Saskatchewan River to the west. And it was seen from the east where cows lazily pastured, and more grain fields were sown.
Every day through our kitchen window, we could spy this tree topping all others in the not-too-far distance, over the garden, the pig yard, and the creek, the vegetable garden and yard in between. As we gazed through that window to check on the weather, to search for our parents or a sib outside, or to catch a glimpse of the school bus through a clearing up the road so that the five of us could all scurry out in time to clamber on at the end of our driveway, this tree was a constant. It was there during all four seasons, providing a contrast to the leafless trees of winter, the rich gold and browns of autumn, the light greens of spring and the deep greens of summer. The tree’s backdrop was the huge sky, changing between a multitude of shades of grey, white and blue. This tree offered a calming presence.
It grew on our land, actually the land of my parents, the land that they chose to purchase in the 40s to make a living as farmers and to create a home, a life for themselves and the family they had already started with the birth of a son a year or so earlier. But the pine had much deeper roots, our father told us.
It was already there when his mother, my Baba arrived in this untamed region from her small western Ukraine village in 1899. Her trek with her husband and three children in a small party of fourteen other villagers was arduous. The small group travelled through Austro-Hungary to Hamburg, boarding a Canard line ship to cross the great Atlantic in steerage, arriving at the immigration shed at Pier 2 in Halifax, and making their way by train to Edmonton. The final three-day leg of the trip to the quarter of land they were to clear, work and settle was on foot. In this colder, more brutal land without roads or worn pathways, without the warmth and comfort of friends and family close by, and without established homes, gardens and fields, this tree was a welcome landmark for these new arrivals.
It was our Baba’s compass. As a young woman, Baba gained the skills of midwifery and helped many women in the expansive developing community with pregnancies and birthing of many a child. Baba toiled on another farmer’s land during hay and harvest season in exchange for grain to augment her family’s livelihood. Often exhausted, full of concern for her own children who she had had to sometimes leave alone, she set her sights on seeking out this tree to focus her mind, to ease her worries and to guide her safely to her home.
This tree had the tenacity to rise above for so long, the will to survive the elements, and the beauty to inspire.
Its physical stature diminished over the years at the hand of nature, first by a bolt of lightning that downed its elegant pinnacle and then with the passing of years, its trunk wearily bent. Baba’s physical stature also diminished over the years at the hand of nature, and she too lived a long life during which she wordlessly enveloped us with a quiet love.
As in the way of boreal forests, other pine trees have sprouted and have risen up, now displacing the poplars and birches. They are now redrawing the tree line and this prairie landscape, and they offer a different kind of calm.
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