"Plant a Tree, Laddie, It'll Grow While Ye're Sleeping!"

(old Scottish saying)

I often dream of my old home. For most of the time between 1963 and 1990 , I lived with my family in a ranch house near a quarry, at 8 West Avenue in the university town of Sackville New Brunswick. (My father was a physics professor at Mount Allison University.) The only exception was four years in which my father went away on sabbatical: 1965-66 we lived in Brighton, England, just when it was the big mod centre, something we were totally unaware of; 1974-75, when we lived in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga; 1981-82, when we spent the first half near Canterbury, England, and the second half in Toronto; 1988-89 when we were in Scotland. (I'm the youngest in the family, and by the time of his last sabbatical I was the only child still living at home.) That's a total of about 23 years.

At age 28 I finally moved to Toronto, visiting Sackville in May and August for the next few years. My parents eventually moved there too, and we finally sold the house in 1996, after renting it out for a couple of years. My parents and I came back to Sackville for a few days just before it was sold, and I'm glad I took that last trip.

My dreams about the old home feel funny because even as I dream, part of me remembers that it's now somebody else's house. I've sometimes dreamed that we're temporarily renting the house back from the owners! These dreams seem to take place in August, and sometimes I dream that it's time to return to Toronto and that we won't be coming there anymore. Other times I dream that I'm visiting the new owners. I feel like an intruder, even though I didn't ask to dream this way. We bought the house I now live in from a family that moved back to Portugal; I wonder if they dream about it too. (I also dream about a cottage we used to have near Northumberland Strait when I was a kid.)

About five years ago my parents and I were travelling in the Maritimes and we stopped in Sackville. We drove by the old house, and even parked at a discreet distance to look at it. (The new owners have laid a semicircular driveway on the front yard, like my aunt's house near Sydney, Nova Scotia.) What really impressed me were the trees. Over the years we've planted dozens of trees around the property, and some of them have grown really big. There's the weeping willow out back that's almost as old as me; the oak tree my brother transplanted from the other side of the quarry as a boy scout project (I think); the Scotch pine we planted in 1975; the fir trees we dug up out of town; the two maple trees we transplanted from the roof of the physics building auditorium in 1980 (they'd sprouted from leaves that fell off tall maples); the apple trees in the back yard; the poplar trees that emerged in 1985 as offshoots from our neighbor's poplars (they emerged because the early summer was really rainy, and my sister was getting married in Halifax so we didn't get around to mowing the lawn for quite a while).

Thinking about how the trees have continued to grow and grow after we left, I can't help thinking about how the trees you planted (literal and metaphoric) will continue to grow after you're dead, which gives me an odd feeling of comfort. I think I'd like to be cremated and have a tree planted over my ashes, as they often do in China. The Chinese have a proverb that goes, "Our ancestors planted trees; we sit in the shade." So let's all plant trees for our descendants.