Excerpts from Just Clara May
by Clara May Ayres

The Swaying Poplar Tree

The worst thing in my life, when I was thirteen, was having to do the dishes! That took up the most wonderful time of the evening, just at twilight, when I longed to be out playing. I could hear the boys laughing and yelling. (They didn't have to do the dishes, being at an early age, Male Chauvinists!) Of course, by the time I was finished clearing the table and washing the dishes it was too dark for a girl to go outside.

I usually resorted to hiding up in a poplar tree just as soon as I had eaten. I would even skip my dessert, excuse myself (everyone thought I was going to the bathroom) and run out doors, climb the tree and hide until Grandmother or Aunt would give up calling me and recruit someone else. I always hoped it would be my brothers. What a delightful episode that would be!

"Look Ma! I swing and sway like Sammy Kaye." There I was, hanging on the single topmost limb of a tall, tall Poplar tree, 100 feet above the ground while my darling mother was about to have a heart attack watching me. Not being a hysterical type of mother she wanted to get me down without scaring me, so she went into the house and got some cookies. Mother came out and called to me to come down; she had a surprise for me. I clambered own, every branch bending with my weight and found two surprises waiting for me, cookies and a good shaking and scolding with the admonition, 'DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN! Suppose that branch had broken and no others to grab onto?"

"But Mama, I've been doing that for a long, long time and it hasn't broken yet." A twelve year old knows no fear, it seems. Come down from my lovely tree, whose rustling leaves whispered a thousand secrets just for me? In those leaves so thick I could hide at any time, especially when there were dishes to be washed or when my older brother Elmer was looking for me to tease. It was my tree, just for climbing and hiding. Branches, both large and small all grew upward, upward, to the sky. Where I could climb, climb, climb up to the stars!

Sometimes on my way up the tree, I'd pause and look at a single leaf. Those wonderful leaves that would hide me when I'd cried, wanted to die, and when I was happy and laughing when the birds flew by. Each triangular leaf is on a tender, slender neck that lets it twist and turn and tremble with the slightest breeze.

Although this tall and stately tree bends in the wind, it can fight back too. Just watch a Poplar in a storm. It sways and swings back and forth, back and forth, whipping every gust of wind away. If you ever cross the country you will see rows of Poplar trees guarding farm houses from the tortuous storms.

No one knows, but me, where my tree is, but it's still there waiting to be my great-grandchildren's special tree.

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