I come from a weeping willow. I’ve been melancholy ever since. Ever since the secrets in the leaves leaked out like they were desperate to know me. We re-did my bedroom when I was nine. Pink walls, green curtains. Beaded, bulbous shapes on the ends of each rod. If you pushed the curtains aside, long windows offered a front-row seat to the yard I pitched an old tent in the summers. I drove past the first address I called home once but someone grew an ivy wall out front. When the house belonged to the three of us, it was yellow with a blue door. The willow’s green stretched high above the roof from behind, watching us closely like she found us out wandering one day. Roots stretched deep below the grass.

Mornings, mom grabbed stockings from the closet we shared in my room and slipped into channel pumps, headed for the law firm she would eventually quit. If it was a Saturday, I was allowed to watch PBS Kids. On weekdays, she walked me to the bus stop on the corner before school. The sky was a murky gray most times, like someone forgot to fully download Tuesday’s file.

I didn’t understand why dad felt achier than other people but his laugh was always the loudest. The willow was not a place for jokes. The willow was where your ache was softened by padded earth and covered in the canopy of leaves. I had birthday parties with pink and red and candy hearts because it was near Valentine's Day. I liked that.

We stuffed the Thanksgiving Turkey in the kitchen listening to the Indigo Girls. The table was one of those red Formica ones from the 50’s. Dad taught me how to carve a pumpkin. The printer was always jamming. When it snowed, kids from the neighborhood rolled snowmen in our front yard and drank hot chocolate at that table. I’ve been hunting that popularity ever since.

It’s hard to get along with everyone when you come from the willow. You can’t just go around telling people you were born from the shade and that’s why you crave the sun. The willow was not a place to bargain with the ache. The willow held the ache and you, together. It’s the truest place I can call home because life will always reveal itself to be us, and the ache. Together.