YOU COME FROM SPRUCES

You come from spruces, tall and thick green
hills that hold up dogwood flower dusk skies.
You come from hikers and swimmers in lakes
and bears in thick British Columbia brush.
You come from air sappy with spruce
memories, trails softened with spruce needles
and sap on your under-soles.
And all that time you spent near spruces, how it became
a mythical part of your story, and did you know
that green spaces including spruces lead to longer telomeres—
signs of cellular health.
You see, it’s in your DNA.
You come from so much love: sister, mom, dad, aunts,
grandparents that all want to hold spruce branches
over you when it rains - ‘don’t catch a cold, don’t
talk to strangers,’ and me: don’t grow up, don’t grow up,
but please grow up into the life you love most.
You come from British Columbia sunsets,
music festivals, and golden air.
You come from never ending spruces,
lined up like you in your graduation—
tall, beautiful and proud.
You come from spruce needles and sap,
sweet like pancakes at the diner
when you were seven and we took you
to diner brunch with your big blue eyes.
You come from long tethered spruce skies
turning green with night and green
with northern lights and green
with missing home when it hits you
in the middle of your studying
for law exams. (UK is lush-green and rainy;
beautiful but isn’t there a spruce tree somewhere?)
Maybe you turn the book’s page
in your pine study carrol
to a geographic atlas picture of a spruce
or case laws on property disputes
involving crown land and spruces.
Maybe you enter the book,
miss your life back home,
feel spruce needles brush your arms,
bare your heart for the spruces
that held you at birth and every year
since. You are alive, you are so alive, this is the moment
of your life, right now, right here, and wherever
you go, wherever you go, spruces
will forever be everywhere.
Sun on their needles
will be shining for you.