The Mouse Tree after storms came through Richardson.(Photo by William J. 'Bill' McCalpin)
There is a creek in northwest Richardson that is so puny that it doesn’t even have a name. The creek runs about 500 yards from the Reservation’s Mimosa Park to the west branch of Cottonwood Creek. Just a few feet from where the creek crosses under North Cheyenne Drive, a tree stood anonymous and nearly invisible for 30 years. Rooted in the side bank of the creek, the tree grew first sideways, then clawed its way up to the sky. Pushing and shoving, the tree grew this way and that, so that it was gnarled and twisted, with nary a straight line to be found. It had no single leader, but multiple stems reaching upwards as they dodged and weaved through the taller, older trees that predated it.
Even for a hackberry, the tree was hideous.
Not only was the tree unpleasant to the eye, but it was covered top to bottom with sticker vine, a vine rife with thorns that was able to grow straight out of the undergrowth upward of six feet, twisting and turning and looking for a branch or trunk to latch on to. Because the hackberry was stunted, it became the favorite target of sticker vines, and for many years, the tree resembled nothing so much as a Halloween set decoration. From time to time, its own leaves were outnumbered by the leaves of the vines, and the vines covered the tree with a ghoul-like shroud.
Scionnach(Photo by William J. 'Bill' McCalpin)
Scionnach was a teenaged cat when he came to us. He had a natural ability to take down prey like mice and birds and lizards even though he lived inside 23 and a half hours a day. He kept the attic clear of rodents – important when you live on two creeks and they always find a way in – and when allowed outside under our watchful eyes, he stunned us with his ability to find prey that really should have been better adapted to the outdoors than he.
Cats are not human beings; they have no sense of the “ugly” that we so easily label people and animals and plants with. One day, Scionnach caught a mouse in the side yard. The mouse had come down a certain particular ugly hackberry tree, and Scionnach made an easy and happy score. From then on, when Scionnach was allowed outside, he would go to that tree and sit in its shadow, waiting for the tree to produce another gift for him.
From then on, the hackberry was the “mouse tree,” and Scionnach made daily pilgrimages to wait in its shade for another gift from the gods. For him, the tree was not ugly or hideous or an offense to the eye; it was the source of pleasure and food. It was a divine symbol, a Tree of Life. For that reason, even if Scionnach could have understood the callous human emotion of disdain for the “ugly,” he would have never applied it to the Mouse Tree, the giver of mice, the natural food and delight of cats. The Mouse Tree — twisted, gnarled, and bent — represented the divine in his world, the source of what a cat needed. How could the Mouse Tree be ugly or hideous?
Are your parents or grandparents ugly? No, they can’t be, because you meet them at such a young age that your judgment is based only on the good they do for you. Your parents and grandparents – and the gods – are a part of your life from such a young age that value judgments like “ugly” and “offensive” and “hideous” simply never occur to you. What did Thomas Jefferson say, “that I love those most whom I loved first?” So it was with Scionnach – the Mouse Tree was his first source of pleasure in the form of wild game.
Scionnach left us several years ago, when a blood disease cut his life short between the last ring of the doorbell on Halloween evening and the cold clear dawn of All Saints Day. And the Mouse Tree left us this Friday evening when an autumnal cold front moved through while the revelers were crowding the streets of downtown Dallas before the annual Texas-OU football game. There were winds and rains and storms, and by morning, the tree was stretched out on the ground between the creek and the corner of the house.
They say that on a space flight to the planet Mars, that a vessel from Earth would accelerate for one half the journey as it speeds away from Earth, and then the vessel would flip around and decelerate for the second half of the trip as it approaches the end of the journey.
It’s the same with life – you spend the first half of your life running and growing and stretching yourself to get away from your birth – and then you spend the second half of your life pushing and straining against the monsters that you cannot avoid at the end of your life. The first part of your life is a vacuum, to be filled with new sensations and experiences; the second half of your life is filled with the ever encroaching memories of the beautiful things that you have seen and done. You look forward for the first half; you look backwards for the second.
Monday, as we hacked away at the vines and sawed the fallen wood, I looked back and saw Scionnach in the failing twilight before the Mouse Tree, a long-haired ball of bright orange fur against the dark green grass, silently and patiently for his tree of life to provide.
The Mouse Tree was a short-lived “trash” tree; Scionnach was an orange tabby mutt of a cat. Both existed for just a brief moment in time in a remote corner of the Earth, itself one of eight or nine planets in a lonely solar system on the outer third of our galaxy. In the vast and infinite reaches of the universe, there is no reason to remember them, yet both live in my memory. But I, too, am mortal. The day will come when my memories will be buried with me.
I loved them both. So before the monsters come for me, I want to give them a gift, the most priceless gift that we children of God can give.
For so long as poets and historians and scholars can read 21st-century English, with these words, I give them the most divine gift possible, the gift of immortality.
Scionnach and the Mouse Tree, now they are together forever.
Bill McCalpin is president of the Friends of the Richardson Library. He also serves on the city’s library board and is the civic chair for the Reservation Neighborhood Association. He has an interest in writing on government and citizen participation in the city.