Take a trip with me back to 1966.

Lunch dishes were washed, dried and put in the cupboard. Dad went back to the fields. Mom took a basket of clothes out to the clothesline by the garden.

The summer afternoon stretched out before me, the pint-child, still too young for farm labor but old enough for solo adventures. Letting the porch screen door bang, I crossed the yard and took off for the back pasture. The first cutting of hay filled my head with rich, green fragrance. The soft buzz of insects in the tall grass sent vibrations into the warm air. I followed the trickle of the creek to the end of the pasture where my kingdom awaited.

A cottonwood tree had been struck by lightning in a storm years before, splitting it down the middle. Instead of tall branches reaching high into the heavens, the tree stretched long across the ground, offering a little girl a castle, a ship, or a leafy jungle.

The stream kept on feeding the roots of the fractured tree, so it continued to yield a thick canopy of leaves that gave me a cool place to hide, a safe place to be anything I wanted to be.

In July of 2023, PB and I trudged through pastures and climbed over fences to see if my tree was still there after all these years. Behold! Although it looked smaller to me than it did through my seven-year-old eyes, my heart thrilled at the sight. The path of the creek had changed, now flowing directly under the branches instead of around. A chorus of frogs welcomed me back.

I longed to tell my little farm-girl-self that someday she would experience a torrid storm that would strike like lightning and leave a scar. It would break her open and lay her flat. Mothers shouldn’t die of cancer.

Yet, I also wanted to tell her that streams of living water would rush to her roots, giving life despite the deep wound.

Fifty years later, I may not be able to stand perfectly tall and strong, but I am flourishing and my leaf does not wither.

“She is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season,
and whose leaf does not wither.”
Psalm 1:3