The Pieces
That Made Me
Whole

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in the front room of our house in Lake Stevens, Washington, looking out the window at the giant evergreen trees across the street.

I was young, but I remember those trees. They were tall, quiet, and steady. They stood there through rain, wind, gray skies, and the kind of storms that seemed to roll through Washington without asking permission. As a child, I did not have the words for why they mattered to me, but I think I felt something in them that I needed.

They were peaceful. They were strong. They did not argue. I do not remember the exact day I started looking at them that way. I only remember the feeling. When the house felt too loud or too heavy, my eyes would find those trees. They gave me somewhere to look when I did not know what to do with what I was feeling.

Inside the house, there were arguments I did not understand. I was too young to know what adults carry or why people who love each other can still hurt each other with their words. I only knew the sound of it, the tension of it, and the way it made everything in me tighten.

The arguments felt like tremors in the house. Sometimes they felt bigger than tremors. They felt like earthquakes inside a home that was supposed to feel safe.

That does not mean my childhood in that house was all darkness. It was not. There were birthday parties, baseball, school, snow, animals, my brothers and sisters, the backyard, and moments where life felt normal and full of possibility.

That is what made it confusing. There could be laughter one day and tension the next. There could be love in the home and still be pain in the air. There could be beautiful memories and still be something underneath that felt unstable. As a child, I did not know how to hold both truths at the same time.

When you are a child, you do not know how to separate what belongs to you from what belongs to the adults around you. You hear anger and wonder if you caused it. You feel sadness and wonder if you did something wrong. You sense distance between people you love, and somehow your young mind tries to solve a problem it does not even understand.

I think that is why I looked out the window so much. Those trees gave me somewhere to put my eyes when I did not know where to put my heart. I would sit there and wonder about them. How long had they been standing there? What had they seen? How could they stay so still while everything else felt uncertain? As a kid, you wonder about the things adults can no longer see. You give life to trees, clouds, shadows, and silence because sometimes they feel safer than the noise inside the house.

I did not know I was searching for peace. I just knew I liked looking at those trees. They felt like something larger than the arguments. Larger than the mood in the room. Larger than whatever had gone wrong that day. They made me feel like there was still a world beyond the heaviness, a world that could be quiet and beautiful and steady.

Maybe that was one of my first lessons in survival. Sometimes a child finds peace wherever he can. In trees. In silence. In imagination. In prayer. In anything that gives him a place to breathe when the world inside the house feels too heavy to understand.