When I was very young, we lived in a mobile home on a corner lot. The row of homes behind ours sat slightly uphill, with a little rise in the landscape where the neighborhood kids would emerge from their homes to play.
At the back of the yard next to ours stood three poplar trees. Technically, they weren’t ours, but they were close enough that, in the way children understand these things, they felt a little bit like mine.
I don’t remember consciously appreciating them at the time. I certainly wasn’t standing beneath them contemplating their beauty or wondering what trees might symbolize. They were simply there—three tall trees at the edge of the hill that were somehow part of the landscape of my childhood.
What I remember most were their leaves. They were roundish, almost club-shaped, and they had a particular way of moving in the breeze, fluttering and turning so that they caught the light differently from one moment to the next. Sometimes it made the whole tree seem to shimmer or sparkle. I remember looking at them often, although I couldn’t have told you then why they held my attention.
During those same early years, I also had recurring dreams in which I could float. I would find myself up near the tops of those trees, suspended there almost effortlessly, moving through the air around them. It wasn’t really flying, at least not in the way we usually imagine flying. It was more like floating—being up there among the treetops as naturally as I might have been standing on the ground below.
I didn’t think that was particularly remarkable either. They were simply dreams I had, and those three trees were part of them.
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned poplar trees have been given all kinds of symbolic meanings, including resilience, guidance and transformation. I have no idea whether any of that has anything to do with why those particular trees stayed with me, but I find it interesting now.
And then there’s the number three.
There were three poplars standing together at the edge of that hill, and all these years later, three primary guides have become part of my own experiences. Do I think those trees were somehow predicting what would happen decades later? I have no idea. I don’t need them to have been. I just love the possibility that something can become important to us long before we have any idea why.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I keep returning to these early memories. Looking back, I can see things I never would have noticed at the time—not because they necessarily had some predetermined meaning, but because I’ve changed enough to see them differently.
Sometimes I think meaning works that way. We don’t always discover it when something happens. Sometimes we grow into it, and only when we look back do we realize how much of what would matter to us later was already quietly woven into the landscape of our lives.
