The first tree I remember as unique in my memory was when I was very small. I must have been three-four years old. My parents would bring us on Sundays to make a little tour in the forest in Alsace. There was a little chapel there and an oak tree. This oak tree was the tree of Saint Arbogast. Saint Arbogast was a hermit. He lived in the forest, most probably under the oak tree. But the oak tree was very old, maybe 600 years old. So, they had circled the oak tree with big supports of metal to hold it together, and inside they had injected concrete so that it wouldn’t crumble.

For the little boy that I was in front of that huge tree, I was under the impression that Saint Arbogast was living in that tree. And I would stand in front of that tree and imagine how he would sleep in it. How he would write in it. How he would be a Saint. This was a job that I imagined. This tree was a big mystery for me. It was very often that after a visit to this tree I wanted to see it again because I wanted to check something I had thought about…this was the position in which he must have lived inside. When we would go there, I would not say anything to my parents, but I would look at the tree and I would have to admit that even the position I had imagined was not easy. ‘How to live in an Oak tree.’ This was my first tree.

The second tree I remember is a Cherry tree behind the farm of my father’s family, in Alsace, again. The Cherry tree was large and when it was covered with cherries it had red dots everywhere. There was a huge ladder along the tree and we children were not allowed to go up that ladder, but the tree had some very low branches. We would pluck and hang cherries around our ears and we would gorge like birds on cherries. The tree was perhaps bigger in my imagination as a child, but I felt that I was in front of a mountain of cherries. And the feeling was that it was plenty, it was more than enough, it was for a whole life. If you would tell me what is paradise, it was living under this Cherry tree.

Then there were the plum trees. These were smaller trees covered with yellow plums. They were in the garden of my maternal grandfather. When I was young, one of my jobs was…during the season, my grandpa would climb on these trees and he would shake them and the plums would fall. We were asked to pick them and put them into baskets. We would get some small money for each basket. My grandpa made schnapps from the plums. He had a license for it. The men would shake the tree and go away and then the women and children would collect the fallen plums. It was a collective activity. I remember the sister of my grandma, who was a nun, was also a part of this activity. My grandma, my mother, my aunt, all the women were there. There was grass under the tree and I remember that when the plums were picked up my grandpa would come and shake another time, and the women would complain and say, ‘Can you shake well the first time, please?’

Now recently, a tree has appeared in my life. It is not my life, exactly, but I have to live with this tree. My mother’s home, where she lives today, has been built next to a giant Sequoia from America. The Sequoia was planted most probably over a hundred years ago. It’s really wide. My mother is scared of the tree. The tree is really one metre from her house. When the tree shakes in the wind, my mother is scared and I tell her, ‘Mother this tree was here before us, and it will be here after us. Don’t worry.’ But what happened last year, this tree’s roots have decided to come up to the surface. In fact, the roots are going thirty to forty metres far from the tree itself. So, the whole courtyard of my mother’s house started to rise as the roots rose. Now, the anguish of my mother is justified, not because the tree is falling down on her, but because it is lifting everything up! Something will need to be done about it eventually.

Remi Gass has worked as a professional in the publishing industry. He is now retired and divides his time between Alsace in France, and Goa.