The Tree in our backyard

the other people who tended it and the mystery of its age

The Tree in our yard is old, some decades thick, trunk torqued. For many years, it was meticulously maintained, but then it was not. Still, it lives, lives intensely! I have pruned it hard, and still when a plant nerd comes over, they take one look and say, “You want to prune that this winter?!” The Tree changes everything about our yard: when it is green, the yard is green. When it is bare, it is winter.

From my perspective, trees don’t contain the actual spirits of humans (my mysticism runs in other directions). But still, I think of the tree as some kind of embodiment of Lillian Yuri Kodani, the woman who owned our house before she died. She spent 60-some years here. Long before us, she would have known the tree. As she lived her final years on the first floor of the house, this being would have dominated her view out the back window, as it does ours. She would have known that it held its leaves longer than the rest of the trees, and that it was slow to bud in the spring, and the feeling of it, looking up from the trunk.

We used to live down the block, so we knew Yuri (as she was known around here) a little bit, but this tree has forged a different kind of connection. We—Yuri and our family—are the people who have known this organism more intimately than anybody else on earth. I guess maybe the tree doesn’t embody her, so much as all of us, the tenders?

I invented many stories about the tree. Perhaps it was there when Yuri and her husband Eugene Kodani moved into the house in the mid-20th century. But how could I know the age of a living tree? At first, I tried to get a rough sense of things. I had looked at the tree thousands of times from all angles, but trees have a way of inviting your eyes to the whole, not the parts. The tree had become almost two-dimensional to me, a happy old thing with a lollipop head. The branch system, though, revealed a different topology. There is a hollow, a concavity on the west side. It grew up against a garage that’s no longer there, but that ghost remains in the limbs.

Still: no age.

The internet informed me that I could measure the circumference of the tree (37 inches), then divide by pi (3.14etc), and that (almost 12) would be the rough age of the tree. But, no. That’s ridiculous. This is an old tree, that bears the mysterious marks of time, like an ancient sperm whale.

So, I asked Yuri’s daughters about the tree. Kimi and her sister Mia are two of the family history keepers. There is a lot of history to hold. Yuri’s father was Chiura Obata, a remarkable Japanese landscape painter, who came to the U.S. in the early 20th century. Obata made some of the most beautiful paintings ever of California, especially his work in the Sierra. Here’s my favorite, “Evening Glow at Yosemite Falls,” held at the Whitney Museum.

Obata taught art at UC Berkeley. His wife, Haruko, was an expert in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. They ran an art supply store on Telegraph Ave. But then came Executive Order 9066, and the great shame of the internment of Japanese Americans along the west coast.

The Obata family (including a 15-year-old Yuri) were imprisoned, first at Tanforan and then at Topaz, in Utah.¹ In both places, Chiura established art schools that trained hundreds of students, and helped “maintain one spot of normalcy.” Obata’s stark paintings from the Topaz period are as chilling as any artifact created by the imprisoned Japanese Americans. This one, “Moonlight Over Topaz,” is in the FDR Presidential Library and Museum collection.²

When the war ended, Obata was reinstated as a professor at Cal, and eventually the family’s life stabilized. Their son Gyo, who had fled to St. Louis, went on to co-found the huge architectural firm HO(bata)K. Yuri married Eugene Kodani, also an architect. Kodani had been interned, too, but in Arizona, then he served in the U.S. military in Italy. When he returned, he headed to Cal and got his architecture degree. The two of them settled into this very house in Oakland in 1957. They raised their kids much as we have raised our own: in a pack, neighbor kids running from house to house, screen doors banging open and shut. Their kids grew up. Eugene retired in the 90s. He died the year we moved to the block, 2011.

Yuri stayed in the house, watching the street repopulate with children, watching the apple tree bud and leaf and blossom and fruit. Yellowing leaves, last fruit, bare branches. New growth. Year after year.

And then in December of 2018, at age 91, she died peacefully in her sleep, a few feet from where I’m writing, a few feet more from the tree that we share.

In Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, she tells of a visit with filmmaker Sam Green to visit some eucalyptus trees that had been planted by Mary Ellen Pleasant, a San Franciscan by choice, who had been born into slavery in 1812. They stood at the base of the eucalyptus, looking at curls of bark and leaves. “The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone,” Solnit writes. “They changed the shape of time.”

Where, then, in these remarkable Obata-Kodani lives, did this apple tree enter the picture window?

Kimi conferred with Mia and they returned a best guess: their father had planted the tree, probably in the 1980s. The apple had been preceded by a bing cherry, and an apricot that’s now long gone. Their grandparents, the Obatas, also had Santa Rosa plums in their nearby yard. “Our dad liked the annual rituals of pruning and harvesting the fruit trees,” Kimi told me. She sent me this photo she took of her parents with a friend of Mia’s in the yard. It’s 1977. You can see the old cherry. You can see Yuri laughing. You can see the clothes line she always used.

“My mom used to make apricot fruit leather from all the extra ripe fruit, roll them up on plastic wrap, and store them in the freezer. Later in the summer we would take the rolls (orange for apricot and purple for the tangy plum) on our Sierra backpack trips,” Kimi said. “When the old fruit trees died, dad must have decided to plant the apple tree.”

This tree, all this to say, might be more of my contemporary than I had guessed, something like 40 years old. A peer, as much as a mentor. Mid-life, amid life, you can see it here on the December day we met in 2019. Much has changed, but the clothesline remains.

The truth is: from a horticultural perspective, the apple tree in our backyard is nothing special. The apples are reddish yellow, not too sweet, not too tart, not too tasty. But to be a part of this tree’s life is to be a part of the story of those who planted it. To keep this tree alive is to tend some small piece of Eugene’s memory, some mote of Yuri, some component of the tragedy of what happened to their families, to feel into the concave space where this tree never got to grow, and yet still thrives, and where its branches are searching out the new light, even right this minute.

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I want to hear your stories of trees, or rather, of The Tree in your life at some point. The one you shepherded through some part of its life, or that comforted you through a hard time. You glimpsed The Tree from a bay window. It was out in the courtyard. It grew into your sidewalk. Your grandfather painted it over and over, but you never could understand why. The Tree sat in a large pot at the bottom of the stairs. It was your guidestar on a favorite run. It was the last thing alive in the yard. It was a giant oak that you ran beneath as you time-lapsed from child to young adult, and then you (or it) disappeared.

Tell me these stories. Leave a comment. Or send me photos or drawings (alexis.madrigal@gmail.com). I want us all to share our trees. And I will, if y’all send me them.

1. You can hear then 102-year-old Yae Wada describe this experience on Forum a couple years ago.

2. How did it come into the possession of FDR’s library? The museum explains: “In May 1943, shortly after Eleanor Roosevelt’s well publicized visit to the Gila River camp in Arizona, a delegation from the Japanese American Citizens League visited the White House to express their gratitude for her concern for the treatment of Japanese Americans. During their visit they presented this painting of the Topaz camp to the First Lady. On June 16, Mrs. Roosevelt sent a letter to Obata thanking him for the painting. She displayed it in her New York City apartment until her death.”