The death of maple 

Maple was growing up in a 7UP bottle, no holes in the bottom to let the extra water out. Just a small frail Japanese Maple, she looked suffocated, and she was put in the shade. I felt I had to liberate her and find her a better home. Realistically I didn’t really believe I could give her a better home. My children and I were living in a broken-down minivan off highway one. The van would not go more than 25 miles an hour, the transmission was going, and we knew we would have to put it in the shop soon. Once we did, my children and I would have no place to sleep. When the van finally died we slept in a business that let us sleep under their office table. I put Maple in better soil to grow in and make sure there were holes for the water to drain. She could breathe again. 

In our van, Maple became our front cup holder Christmas tree. We decorated her with little tiny broken earrings and the kids loved the little dollar store lights I put around it. At night, the cold was so bad that I would shiver and make my baby kick inside of me. I felt as if the baby was cold as well. I would put extra blankets around my stomach to try to keep my stomach as warm as I could. I had a cough the entire time I lived in the van with my kids because it was cold and wet and I couldn’t keep the cardboard dry that we slept on. I kept my one year old son inside of a snowsuit. I was still breastfeeding him. During that pregnancy, I was homeless the entire time. When my daughter was born, we went to a shelter because I knew I couldn’t keep the baby warm. 

I knew that there was something bad in the air in the van because it was always leaking and wet and the cardboard would just stack on top of each other to make it cushiony and sometimes not even notice the layer of water that was underneath us as we slept. I would get woken up to flashlights in the van as officers would tap at the windows telling us to move. Sometimes I would just drive all night while my kids slept in the van and would find places to park and sleep during the day. It was Christmas Eve and we had parked our van outside of Twin Lakes church thinking we would be safe on Christmas Eve night. I remember the loud banging on the window. I woke my baby and he began to cry. I was scared and I was already cold as they opened up the van and made us get out and sit on the side of the road in the gravel. They emptied out the entire van looking for drugs and they only found black mold. 

I remember wanting to hold my son and keep them from crawling on the gravel with broken glass, but the police would not allow me to hold them. The officers said, “we have told you people to park on the other side of the highway”. When they let us go, the inside of the car was wet because of the rain. None of our blankets were dry and his diapers were all on the wet road. Nothing was dry so I drove all night with the heater on as my son slept in damp clothes. I was low on gas so I parked, overlooking Capitola wharf. I could barely hear the waves or the wind that blew that bitter cold air in my ears. I woke up to my son as he sat up and started crying. I could not hear, everything was muffled and sounded like there were hands over my ears. 

When I was a child I would have horrible earaches because our home was damp and cold. My mom could not afford the heating and we lived in Boulder Creek with heavy rains. When I would have an earache my mom would heat up a spoon of vegetable oil on the hot burner then she would press the hot spoon against my ear as she poured the hot oil. I knew not to say a word. I knew not to flinch because it would only be worse. She would press harder on my ear with the spoon. Eventually, I could hear less and less. In my adult life I did not understand that I was hard of hearing. I just thought the whole world sounded like that. I did not get hearing aids until I was 40 years old. 

I struggled with PTSD and I had an incredibly hard time going outside. I had uncontrollable ticks that would make people stare at me and I would get really self-conscious. I would play with my kids in parks when no one else was there. We would spend all day at the park inside the mall to stay dry when it was raining. I would bathe my baby in the Safeway sink then we would hang out at the libraries to charge the kids pads and my cell phone, which was the hardest part because I could not keep my phone charged and then I could not reach my doctors or my doctor’s reach me. 

Maple grew out of her 7 up bottle and found her new home in a coffee cup from 7-11. Even though I could not provide Maple the home I wanted her to be in, she was still growing. My partner tried to sleep in the car with us but his alcoholism got worse until one night he got drunk and kicked me in the stomach, almost killing my daughter and separating her placenta from the wall. I called the police and he left me in the van bleeding lying in his vomit and pee. 

Immediately, I was placed in a shelter in Watsonville. Each family lay in a twin bed in a bunk bed with an entire family sleeping on a twin bed on top. It was scary and I would stay up watching them as the women looked at me dirty. I could not hear what they were saying but I could read their lips. Many of my diapers were taken. I had to hide toilet paper in the pillow so that my kids could have something to wipe with. They would wake us up at the crack of dawn and we would try not to drive around or turn on the heat to waste gas. We would simply sometimes just go sit in our van. It helped us get into a tiny studio where the bathroom literally was at the end of the bed. I was so grateful that we had our own little tiny place, a fridge and a place to pee. It was heaven on earth. 

I brought Maple in for the first time and she got to enjoy the temperature inside and warm home. Random men would jump the back fence and go to another little studio in front of us. We could hear her bed knocking against the wall. My kids would always say hello who’s there thinking someone was knocking at the front door. I found a tiny TV at the goodwill and played only two VHS tapes that we had over and over and over again: the country bears and the first twilight movie. I had memorized every line in those movies. I kept them playing to drown out the noises of the city and the neighbors. 

I told the kids that someday we were gonna plant Maple in our first home and she would be a beautiful big tree that they could climb on. I would ask the kids which branch would grow big someday and they would put a swing on. Each time it was always different but they always loved imagining what a tree would look like. 

I grew up in the mountains where you had to poop outside. The bitter cold would make it feel like your bones were growing mold and the smell of sawdust never left your clothes. There was a distinct smell people had in the mountains. You could tell where they lived up in ziani up Bear Creek Rd. When the lights would go out we’d all walk into town and hang out at the brewery and have candlelight and hot coffee waiting on the radio to see what was going on with the weather. I grew up in extreme weather. We had floods, we had landslides. Living in the city was the hardest thing for me. It made me anxious and panicked because the sky never got dark and you could never see the stars. I was used to woods and crickets at night and instead I would just hear carts being pulled by full of cans chattering against the metal, people screaming at each other. I just wanted my kids to be safe. We lived in fear. 

Eventually we were gifted with Families in Transitions who helped us get Section 8 and my family was able to move into a housing complex. The first time I took a shower I used about 12 bars of soap that I got at the dollar store. I still felt like I still had dirt on me. I enjoyed bathing the kids and bubble baths and not having to all sleep in one room even though we still did. 

I still had Maple and she grew into a pot and then she grew bigger and bigger. Every year, I would tell the kids next year I promise we will plant the tree in front of our home and we will live the way our ancestors lived. As years passed I stopped telling them that we would have a home and we would plant Maple. She got so big as years passed that her roots began to die. We tried everything to keep Maple alive but eventually, she died. 

I left her on the deck for months. I would look at her dry leaves and her roots all over this soil. And I felt I would never live the way I wanted to live again. I wanted to raise my children in the woods but I raised them in the projects and as they got bigger they were like Maple. They grew out of their pots and began to engage in risky behaviors with other kids in our complex. I saw how they changed and how, like Maple, they outgrew their pots and began to die in a way of walking away from a life they never could have. 

Housing is different for different people, for different cultures. All low income housing is in the city. It is really hard for indigenous people and people of different ethnicities to live in the same kind of housing complexes. I lost the time to bring my kids into nature. All they knew was cement sidewalks and street signs. As my children grew up, they struggled with the temptation to dress the way other kids dress, show off their skin and rely on looks rather than focus on what was more important: their souls. 

As the years rolled on we never talked about Maple again. Year after year it seems that my girls struggled more and more: suicide attempts, physical abuse by their partners, my 11 year old kept running away and was violent. She could not live with me anymore and it broke my heart and killed a part of me that day when I had to surrender my rights and turn her over to the state. I just couldn’t keep her safe. She was so violent, she would hurt her siblings and others, she would run away from school and from home being gone for hours showing up at different parts of the county. She was Maple, slowly dying in a pot that no longer fit her. she spent a month in the ICU unit at Stanford for an overdose at 10 years old. And she, out of all the children, loved nature the most and wanted to live in the woods and have chickens. But we never talked about that, it just hurt too bad because I couldn’t provide them that kind of life. We struggled, we weren’t thriving, we were surviving. 

Now, I have my two older children. Sage has autism and enjoys his walks. He enjoys all the little pieces of nature he finds through cracks of this moment and small potted plants in front of businesses. I never wanted this for them. How dare you force me to tell my children that if they work hard that they can achieve their dreams. That isn’t true. You can work your hardest and it doesn’t matter because the skin you’re born in and the level of poverty you were in holds you down. There is not a ladder to climb out of this hole. I don’t teach my children to have hope. I tell them that if they want something they have to take the steps to get it and be happy where they’re at. No matter how poor you are, you still can have your dignity and honor. You can find the small things that bring you joy and hold on to those. You can never stop watering plants and finding bigger pots to let them grow into.