Tree With Roots

Amorella here. This is the original shade tree still growing over the first grave orndorff dug in the City of Westerville’s Otterbein Cemetery. The diligent reader may or may not remember orndorff wrote about this public work exercise in the 1 September post a little over a month ago. His axe hacking at the roots to trim the naked grave walls some forty years ago has done little tree damage from the looks of it. This photograph, taken about three years ago, is pretty much the same tree scene orndorff saw as he woke up from his earthy floor nap and climbed out of the hole he had constructed in cemetery ground.

I don’t know why you are bringing this event up again, Amorella. You could have just done something with the tree as a tree, no one would know any different. I wouldn’t know the difference myself other than I decided to lay down at the grave site and take a picture as a reminder of how it was some, as you say, forty years earlier.

You must therefore personally consider this tree sacred.

I must, otherwise I would not have returned to take the picture. We were having a family reunion and visiting the cemetery at its conclusion. I had the camera with me because of the reunion. A cousin at the reunion had given me a set of wire divining rods for dowsing and I was curious about using it. Since we were heading to the cemetery I thought I would try them. It seemed to work, the rods crossed when over particular gravesites, but I don’t know what it meant other than there were human remains underneath the ground. My cousin-in-law had used such a divining rod on his Kentucky farm and found a small early family cemetery.

More to the point, why, in particular, do you consider the tree in the photograph sacred?

It is not a common tree though I feel a reverence to most trees particularly the long lived ones. For instance one of the trees in the cemetery is estimated to be over four hundred years old which to me is quite spectacular considering all that has happened to human beings over that time period.

The tree’s roots are important to me because I was afraid, at the time of the dig, that I would kill the tree to make room for a grave. I rationalized at the time that if I didn’t dig the grave, someone else would, and in any case the roots were going. The bigger roots were the size of an adult male athlete’s upper arm, none reached the size of a strong, husky male’s thigh though.

The common element of the tree and myself was/is that both of us would eventually find common ground in the Otterbein Cemetery. I have always felt a part of that cemetery so in a sense the whole cemetery is a sacred place. I grew up playing among those granite stones. I know some of the people who are buried there. Several high school classmates as well as many others of various ages now ageless.

Presently I am writing a memorial to one of them, my first friend who died. We were in the eighth grade and he was in a terrible automobile accident. I have visited his gravesite and at least one other of my high school classmates over the years. They are not forgotten. Common ground. Not to mention many, many relatives. Again, common ground. I remember the last time I picked up a shovel to dig a grave in that cemetery. It was to bury the cremated remains of my wonderful parents-in-law, that was in 1992.

Otterbein Cemetery in Westerville, Ohio is a sacred place to me and I am sure others have their sacred places for the Dead also. The reason that particular tree is important to me is that it is on common ground and that I touched its buried roots that continue to grow. The tree roots will not touch my grave though because it is located about a football field to the west. I will be resting within twenty yards of my one time eighth grade friend. I consider this to be a good thing.