Sanity Check: A Cedar Slice of Life

Most of the items that decorate the walls in our home are pretty self explanatory: family photos in most every room; framed book covers in my office; candles and vases, here and there.

But one item on the living room wall always gets puzzled looks and requires explanation.

It’s an odd-shaped slice from a cedar tree trunk. The slice looks just like a single open quote mark. Its center whorls are dark umber, while the edges near the rough bark are amber.

The slice is from a cedar tree that once stood at the center of a small cemetery near a small village in a small holler in eastern Kentucky , where my family of origin is from. The kind of small, family cemetery that’s tended by local farm families, even if none of their kin are buried there.

My maternal grandparents are buried there, and some great-grandparents, and a favorite cousin who died far too young.

As a kid, I knew Memorial weekends were reserved for “visiting the graves,” as we called it. We’d go to that cemetery, where a preacher would hold a service, and we’d sing a few hymns, and then leave flowers on the graves, before going on to visit other nearby graves.

Truth be told, my favorite part was taking refuge under the ancient cedar tree. I liked standing with my back against that old tree. There was something sturdy and peaceful about it… comforting… because sometimes what the preacher had to say was kind of scary (at least to a kid), or sometimes the service went on a bit, or sometimes the raw emotion that the hymns evoked was just a little overwhelming.

Those annual treks to visit the graves (and, in my mind, the cedar tree) became semi-annual after awhile, as time passed and the tradition started to fade. Semi-annual morphed into rare… and now it’s been more than ten years since I’ve gone.

Not long after my last visit, I learned from my father that the cedar tree had died, and the cemetery caretakers had put out the word that they had to cut down the tree, for safety reasons. But kin of those laid to rest in that cemetery were welcome to a slice of the tree’s trunk.

I jumped at the chance. I got the slice a few weeks later and sanded its surfaces smooth, while being careful not to disturb the bark. Next, I applied a clear coat of varnish to protect the wood.

Then, I hung it in the living room of our first house.

I hung it in the living room of our second house.

Now it hangs in the living room of this home.

And it will be with me wherever we live next.

Usually, I don’t give this unusual wall decoration more than a passing glance. But though the visiting-the-graves tradition ended long ago, on each Memorial Day, I take a few moments to really look at that cedar slice.

I like remembering how the cedar tree spread its sheltering, comforting branches over all of us gathered at the cemetery for our annual Memorial Day rite.

The tree, back then, somehow conveyed to me in a way the preacher’s words didn’t that while death brings sorrow, life finds a way of going forward, from one generation to the next, wherever there is love and comfort and compassion.

And I like contemplating how, in its new life as an open-quote-mark shaped decoration, that cedar tree continues to whisper the same message to me.