Stop, look closely, and you will see beauty

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

It is a perfect little tree, the kind a first-grader would draw and be proud of, with a skinny trunk leading up to skinnier branches raised like a music director's skinny arms when she is beckoning an audience to sing.

It's a minimalist tree. Not a stunner like the dogwood in front of the Canton Public Library or the magnolias that line Boston's Marlborough Street. Or the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., or California's redwoods.

Nobody would ever stop and gape at it. Or take its picture. But I do.

I bought it at Polillio's Garden Center in Stoughton six Aprils ago. It cost $50 and fit in the back seat of my car. I liked it instantly. I had looked at all the bigger trees, of course, and was stunned by them the way I'm stunned by all the pretty faces in People magazine. And sure, I would have loved to have bought a full-grown beauty and brought it home and dazzled the neighbors. But these gorgeous photo-ready trees cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. And had to be delivered. And then someone with a backhoe or someone with big brawny arms had to dig a gigantic hole, then wrestle the giant into the ground.

I bought the little tree instead, drove it home, dug a hole, planted and watered it, and, OK, talked to it a little and was in the middle of securing it with twine and stakes when my husband pulled into the driveway.

"What's that?" he said. "It's a pear tree," I replied, feeling like a flight attendant who is passing out foil-wrapped plastic trays labeled "chicken" but chicken that's hard to recognize. "This is what it's going to look like," I said, handing him its identification tag, which showed a magnificent in-its-prime pear tree covered in white blossoms. (Think Charlize Theron in white.)

My little tree, of course, didn't look a thing like its picture. It looked like an upside-down paint brush, the kind that comes with kids' coloring books, only bigger. It was so tender and small back then that it would have blown away without stakes. I wondered if it would survive the summer, never mind its first winter.

But it did. It even grew (a little) and though the lamp post continued to dwarf it, that next summer it looked like a tree.

Now? This year? It is two times as tall as the lamp post and hoop-skirt full at the top and next to its new leaves are the beginnings of tiny white blossoms, which are every pear tree's proud plumage for a short while in the spring. Every tree except my little tree. It had never borne a single white blossom before. But now, here it is, this year about to strut its stuff.

Before this little tree, three huge oaks lived in my front yard, imposing things that kept the yard cool and the grass from burning and the impatiens from drying out. Squirrels played in their branches, jumping from tree to tree, and my children posed for pictures in their shade. They were not beautiful trees like the red maple next door or the huge tree with the elephant-like trunk tattooed with carved initials just down the street. But I loved them. And when the first got sick and died, and then the second, and then the third, all I could see was the empty space where they should have been.

Now I sit and look from my office window at the tiny tree that could never take the big trees' place. And it hasn't. It's too small to give shade and too skinny and acornless to attract squirrels. It doesn't wow photographers or command attention. And I have yet to pose one of my children or grandchildren in front of it. It is, to the random eye, not a thing of beauty, nothing to even glance at.

And yet this skinny little thing with its tiny little blossoms, this first-grade drawing of a tree, is beautiful. You just have to look a little harder to see.