Ode to the Magnolia Tree

When my parents retired to Florida, Mom planted this young gangly looking magnolia tree in our front yard and proceeded to tenderly care for it, the leaves so awkwardly big, ugly really; I wasn’t sure what my mom saw in it. But she simply loved Magnolias! She planted her fairly close to the house, near the flag pole, thinking they would make a nice matched pair, somehow complementing each other. She even had Dad build a wooden edging around her skinny trunk, probably to make her more attractive. (I had to mow around this.)

O, Mississippi tree. In Florida. I laugh and think you are so like me! DNA from the South, squarely originating from Mississippi, but so out of place. Awkward. You are a transplant, to put it kindly. I’ve been so tempted over the years to get rid of you because you drop your annoying leaves, so huge, right next to my driveway, clearly seen.

The wooden edging that my daddy placed around you, protectively, really only lasted a decade at the most, your roots hitting against it, moving it outward at odd angles until finally, uncontained, you burst it open. Were you just being rebellious or simply growing to maturity?

I’m glad to report that she is free of her constraint but remains unwieldy and huge. We try to tame her and keep cutting her back away from the flag pole, her branches completely swaying free as she insists upon producing in whichever direction she wishes.

A tree surgeon suggested cutting her down at one point, saying that she was getting too big to be so close to the house. It was then that I realized her import, the essence of what she was to me.

I suspect that one day she will grow so large and so strong that she might just bust up the whole driveway with her powerful roots. Although being a transport from another place, she’s made a deep connection to this place - Florida, and this little acre of land that was once foreign to both her and me. She even has tall reaching branches going in every direction now, her roots having grown strong and stable, deep. The low branches that she maintains over soft patches of ground are her strongest, and they are wonderfully perfect and just the right distance off the ground for a kid to swing upon. Or to hang on. Or to climb in.

Did my Momma & Daddy have any idea that “she” would grow so strong here? That “she” would put down roots and stay?

This transplant.

“He brought me out into a spacious place;

he rescued me because he delighted in me.”

Psalm 18:19