Bond of love keeps individual family members rooted

When we decided to buy a home seven years ago, I had just one request: Please, please could the property have at least one tree, preferably one taller than I am, which is not that hard to achieve.

Yet many of the homes I loved in the suburban neighborhoods I could afford offered only the obligatory row of azaleas along the front walkway.

Then we found the home for us. The backyard was pretty small, but the clouds parted and the heavens sang because there in the center of the suburban lawn was a massive live oak with four trunks reaching heavenward.

Now this was back when buyers actually were competing over homes for sale, so we zipped over an offer quick.

Today, that tree is the centerpiece of my backyard garden.

Four trunks, each about 5-6 feet around, rise from the earth, forming a circle within a foot of one another, but never quite touching, before stretching so divinely upward and outward in different directions.

I like to wonder: Is it one tree or four?

Every now and then, I'm inclined to ask an expert whether these trees actually meet underground as one single living thing. Or are they four separate trees sprung from unique seedlings, yet so closely situated for the entirety of their lives.

Then again, I really don't want to know. Because these four trees are us, my family. Four, but one.

A few years ago, my daughter, Lauren, named each trunk for each of us.

She decided that the largest one, which stretches upward and then over our house, is her protective and hard-working father, the one she summons at night when frightening dreams descend.

The one that reaches more sideways with children's swings hanging from it is her little 4-year-old brother, the one who races around the oak in a good downpour aiming for the mud puddles.

The one that stands almost straight up with branches reaching outward is me, the (mostly) stay-at-home mom, the family organizer, the hearth-keeper.

And the last one, which reaches over our fence into the beautiful, native-blooming field behind our home, is her, my beautiful Thinker.

The four remind me of a passage that the poet-philosopher Khalil Gibran wrote, which I chose for someone to read at our wedding for its beauty:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

And as goes a marriage, so goes an entire family.

We are, in many ways, one. Deep down, we are all pretty thankfully in sync. I hope we always will fill one another's cups with the bond of love that Gibran describes. And in practical terms, as I remind the kids, we sink or soar as a team. Yet we are not one, not really.

We are separate beings, each so different with unique interests and callings. And we each lead busy lives that take us apart every day. So the moving sea does, in fact, flow between us.

Recently, I was talking to a naturalist and mentioned our oak tree. His educated guess was that the four trunks grew from one tree that might share a common root system.

I like that. Independent above ground but forever bonded deeper down.

My daughter is 9 now, so I wonder how this will play out as she and her brother grow and become teenagers and adults.

What happens when our four must welcome others? As they bring home fiances, move out and have children?

I imagine that we will grow apart some, as the four trunks have reached out in different directions seeking their own sunlight and good fortunes.

But underground, I hope that we, too, will remain bonded forever by the roots that anchor the trunks firmly enough to withstand hurricanes and everything else life throws at them.

Contact Jennifer Hawes at jhawes@postandcourier.com or 937-5743.