When I was 11, my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in Kentucky for a week or two in the summer. It was a tradition that some of the grandkids would stay for a while each summer, and I was the one who had yet to do my time. My cousins often stayed for months at a time, but I was awkward and shy and didn't want to be gone for that long.
Looking back on it, I'm still not sure if I had a good time that week in Kentucky. My grandparents were very particular people who had gotten used to not having children around a lot. Not to say that they weren't wonderful to be around and incredibly good to me. They just lived in a very different way than I was used to. They were thrilled to have me visit though, and I have a lot of awkward pictures of skinny, eleven-year-old me all over the place in Kentucky. My grandma made me take swimming lessons at their country club (even though I could swim already, kind of) and I seem to remember visiting some sort of petting zoo.
Unfortunately, my trip was deep in the middle of my terror-of-thunderstorms time. As it turns out, this past year I discussed my tendency to develop intense, irrational fears with my therapist, and she suggested it might not be something I can entirely control, and might relate to my predisposition to anxiety. She suggested I work to control it through medication, and my gosh, life is better now. I didn't know this when I was 11 though, and was horribly terrified of things like wind, rain, and dark clouds. It was exhausting. One evening there was a thunderstorm, which isn't uncommon in Kentucky, and I completely freaked out. My grandmother was baffled and frightened by my fear, but managed to calm me down.
But none of that is actually why I started writing this post. One of the many things we did when I visited was visit Bernheim Forest, an arboretum and research forest my grandparents loved. While we were walking I saw a tree that looked like it had a huge rabbit face on the side. This wasn't just an eleven-year-old's imagination - there really IS a rabbit face on the side of that tree - some sort of growth deformity caused several large bulges that look like a nose, big cheeks, and two even rabbit ears. The tree henceforth became known as the Rabbit Tree, and my grandparents pointed it out to everyone. They even told the park guides, who agreed, thought it was great, and started pointing it out on tours.
I never went back to Kentucky for a visit on my own again, and if I saw the Rabbit Tree after that I don't remember. Eventually my grandparents moved back to an assisted living apartment in Ohio, because my grandmother was sick. She died last summer while I was in Chicago, and on some level it was a relief. She'd been sick for a while, and she wasn't herself anymore. For someone who was so strong, intelligent, vibrant, and in charge it was hard to watch her fade. I miss her more than I expected to, since we all knew the end was coming. She was amazing in a way eleven-year-old me never really understood, and I feel cheated that she had to go just as I was realizing that.
Last weekend was her memorial service, because she had donated her body to science and we had just gotten her ashes back. She had a very definite idea about what she wanted done after she died, and that included no funeral. She wanted her ashes scattered in Bernheim Forest. My grandfather decided to have a bench put below the Rabbit Tree in her memory. I wasn't able to go to the memorial, because the flight would have been too expensive and it's close to graduation. I could have gone, I suppose, but part of me didn't want to deal with it all. On Saturday my mother called me from the park to tell me what the dedication on the bench said. It had "In Memory of," her name, and "She loved the forest, and [my name]'s Rabbit Tree."
I wish I had been there.
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