Our Old Pepper Tree
My childhood home had an old pepper tree growing in the front yard. Before the house’s pink chalky walls were broken down, the web-covered pastel pulverized into dust and vacuumed into nothingness to be renovated into someone else’s home. Before my father sentenced its overgrown limbs to plastic garbage bins, to be hauled off to some landfill. Before its memory-filled leaves were tossed into the shredder, my mother, my sister, and I had our beloved pepper tree. My sister and I spent our childhood crawling over its thick black roots that reached for the dirt like wooden knuckles piercing the soil, weaving in and out, it extended deeper into the earth than we ever cared to fathom. Our curious soft little fingers pressed against the splintered trunk that overflowed into a bouquet of lavish limbs and a sheet of emerald leaves that coated the entire sky, leaving only small gaps for its blue glow to pour into our world of battered dolls and garden potions. My mother would watch my sister and me, as we swung from the homemade rope swing, its splintered seat left with only the chipped remnants of what was once bright red paint. We carelessly threw our heads back as we swung through the haven my mother created for us. She gifted us a fleeting world watered with her own sweat and tears, nailing together wooden planks from Home Depot, climbing up the impossibly high pepper tree and building a treehouse for my sister and me while my dad spent his days at work. Even then, I knew of the empty promises my father made, swearing one day we’d pack our things and leave the old house and the city she hated behind. The years piled up in the corners of every room like old furniture, blending into the chalky wallpaper of the old house, until they blurred into invisibility. His promises hid beneath neglected bills, vanishing into dusty white envelopes and my mothers faith in him quietly slipped beneath the old carpet, escaping between the cracks in the kitchen tiles without any of us noticing. She learned to accept the house, with its dead lawn, withered into gold, and its rotting walls, so full of flaws. She accepted the broken air conditioner and the obnoxious rattle of the dryer, surrendering herself to the gray cul-de-sac, and the gaping distance between herself and her hopes for something better. Far away from anyone or anything she knew, and she made it our home, the pepper tree becoming her silver lining, the single piece of the house she could love. It was our indestructible anchor, tethering us to its beauty in the midst of the hopeless chaos that followed our family. My father even threatened to tear down the tree house my mother built, but that didn’t stop her from spending her summer afternoons climbing up and down her rusty silver ladder so that we could reach the treetops. She’d grown calluses on her soft palms and her fawn freckles became indistinguishable from the dirt and sweat, all so that my sister and I could venture to the impossible heights of the old pepper tree, where we’d dreamed the red berries were spat from and the golden sap leaked. She wanted us to see beyond the concrete borders of our cul-de-sac, past the hissing spray of the sprinkler, past this lonely street she’d settled for. The tree house was a portal to the life that time had stolen from her, transporting us somewhere else, somewhere our child minds couldn’t differentiate from reality but we relished it nonetheless. She refused to pass on life as it had been handed down to her, with all its waiting cruelty, so full of bitterness. The pepper tree was our mother’s embrace, her tired arms shielding us from the world’s unforgiving tides no matter how they pried. For this moment, when she’d prevented them from tumbling in and shattering our world, we were happy.
Until one day, when my father was driving us home from LAX from a Christmas trip that he didn’t attend. My sister and I were strapped into our back seats like miniature statues, gazing stone-faced out the window. The crushing weight of silence between our parents seemed to vacuum every ounce of air from the car, leaving us to suffocate, a ritual we’d grown familiar with. My mother refused to speak or even look at my father, averting her gaze to the passenger seat window. She was still, the tiny strands of her copper hair billowing against the air conditioner her only sign of movement. We listened for the familiar soft drag of my father’s palm against the steering wheel, bracing ourselves as we pulled into the driveway. My mother glanced at the yard, her face instantly dropping into her palms at the sight of what was left of our pepper tree. Its once-spilling wreath of dove nests and wild emerald leaves had been chopped down to stubbed limbs, exposing its naked remains to the cruel sun. Our eyes scanned the hacked wooden edges that left our tree’s insides open wounds, gaping up at the mercy of the sky it once covered. The tree house my mother built remained, nailed among the rugged remains of the barren branches, growing in permanent awkward directions. Up until now, our pepper tree was invincible, even as the dead lawn wilted into gold, sucked dry by the California drought, our tree lived on. Even when our beloved animals died, a heartbreak we could barely stomach, my mother shoveled their graves while my sister and I decorated little stones with our painted fingertips, laying them to rest beside our pepper tree for all time. My father said nothing and climbed out of the car, walking inside unable to comprehend what he’d done. He’d never understand the killing of the pepper tree, the death of our childhood’s everlasting lifeblood. The rearview mirror reflected her hazel glass tears and I watched the dark pearls roll off her soot-colored lashes, dripping into her lap. The apple flush of her face grew damp with betrayal in a way I’d never seen before. Her guttural sobs, visceral and heartbroken, were reminiscent of a wounded animal. The slant sound of her cries sliced through me like a cold rain, pulling out an aching genuineness and I couldn’t help but think this is bigger than any of us.
Later in the evening, after she’d drowned in an ocean of her own tears and her sobs gave way to numbness, I arrived outside her bedroom door, peering curiously through the slight opening. Her eyes fell onto me and she sniffled before throwing her arms open. I crawled into her queen size bed and curled up beneath the familiar soft cavity of her embrace. We rested in silence, time slipping away as we listened only to the gentle harmony between her breath and mine, our moth wing heartbeats in a sad symphony. There was no space or reason for words, only the unspoken mourning we shared, along with the dead leaf echo of what had been lost. In this moment I knew, her sadness was far bigger than our tree, stemming from somewhere more profound than the depths of its roots and maybe even reaching back further than any of us. My tender child mind, dreaming peacefully under my mother’s protection, was a stranger to the true unforgiving world and how ugly it could be. Although I couldn’t pinpoint a single source of her sadness, I understood that life had taken something from her. When my father carelessly hacked away our beautiful pepper tree, he’d stolen a piece of her, tearing the joy she’d watered with her own sweat and tears at the root. I felt her entrapment, a loneliness neither us could articulate at the time. At the sight of my beautiful mother, with her hands tired and calloused from clinging to her happiness despite the world constantly prying it from her, I fought the urge to tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.
By eighteen, when the sheer strength of my mother’s embrace could no longer prevent the world from flooding in, I’d tasted the harshness life had to offer. Face to face with it, I felt the weight of a broken heart. I felt the soft-bellied longing for humanity while being confined to the prison of a girl’s body, a playground for cruelty. A body that I no longer recognized, that no longer felt like my own after being repeatedly stolen from me, yanking me out of the miniature universe of my childhood, a place my mind always seemed to return to in its darkest hours, to the tree house, to my place in my mother’s bed, in her arms. Tearing me by the root, I became familiar with the pain I was capable of feeling and when I lost the strength to resist, I allowed it to reside within me. I learned to slip outside myself and drown in vanity, ripping the cabinets from the walls, smashing glass cups, desperately trying to reclaim the taste of my own skin. I’d dress my wounds in liquor-drenched nights and starve away any remaining softness within me, in an attempt to be cured, to salvage what the world had taken from me. My mother and I fought, mimicking the life that had been passed down to us and spewing insults back and forth. We slammed doors, exchanged blame until I’d flee into the night, wandering the streets in tears. My mother frantically reached within me, pulling me up by the arms no matter how I fought so that I wouldn’t drown. She held my hand in the hospital, pushing a lock of hair behind my ear to expose my face, damp with tears. Even when I refused to hug or even look at her, swatting away her embrace, instead choosing to bury my face in chalky white pillows, she remained by my side, refusing to take her eyes off of me as doctors and nurses filtered in and out of the room.
When the dust finally began to settle, we spent warm afternoons driving through Los Angeles, enjoying the California skies’ purple glow as day bled into dusk. We dug out the secrets we’d kept buried in the depths of our memories, sharing our despair. I told her how my first day attending college, the same one she did, an old friend of hers touched my face softly, telling me how I’d inherited my mother’s beauty, how I’d grown into her spitting image while she was a new law student, fresh-faced and full of potential. You’ve always been like me, she said, telling me how she shoplifted a pair of boots and took polaroids with her best friend as a girl and then cried when her father burned them. She said that she too knew what it means to be violated, to be trapped in a body that strips you of the world’s beauty, blinding you until you learn to create your own. I remembered how she’d been imprisoned in our old house, how she decorated it with potted plants with vines spilling over the round painted edges, how she’d plant pastel flowers, nurturing our dirt-pile backyard into a garden, overflowing with bougainvilleas and morning glories. I understood why she filled plastic hummingbird feeders with sugar water, watching their wings pulse from the window as they drank. I knew why she’d been unable to let go of stray animals my sister and I found on the sidewalks of our cul-de-sac. We always begged to keep them, and my father refused. But my mother couldn’t bring herself to banish them to coyote-ridden streets or sentence them to the pound. Before we could find another home, we’d inevitably fall in love with them, accepting their rightful place in our family despite my father’s disapproval. When our animals grew tired, one by one succumbing to their old age while my mother, my sister, and I sat around them, savoring their final breaths as they died, she’d bury them beneath our pepper tree, solidifying their eternal place in our family. In this moment, I understood her. I understood why she created her own beauty and why she loved in spite of the world. Why she planted gardens that could summon butterflies, so that my sister and I could feel the paperweight of caterpillars inching across our fingers and study each leaf-hanging chrysalis before witnessing the pulse of their orange wings. I understood that my father broke her heart the day he chopped down our pepper tree, why it stole a piece of her soul. We knew now: we weren’t alone and never had been. The undeniable weight of our despair was meant to be shared between us and as we clung to our home-grown joy together, even if the world tried to take it from us, as we pull into our driveway, my mother said I’m sorry I couldn’t save you and I told her It’s okay, just be with me.
Rubina Davila is a freshman Gender and Sexuality Studies major from LA. She is passionate about poetry and creative writing and she wrote this personal nonfiction piece last semester.