Poison Tree

Posted on July 9, 2003 in Adolescence Body Language Pulmonary Writing Exercises

Note: I wrote during my weekly session with the Cafe Writers at the Aliso Viejo Barnes and Noble. The prompt was to write about the backyard where we grew up as a child. This damn tree keeps popping up in my notebooks. I guess I need to have it out with that damn tree.

I hated the Brazilian pepper tree that took up half the backyard. For reasons that only my father fathomed, he laid the lawn out in the shape of a rounded bikini top and trimmed it with a foot wide concrete divider. The pepper tree stood in the left breast cup. It murdered the grass with its shade and its leaf litter. I learned many years later that the foilage was poisonous which explained why I instinctively avoided mowing underneath it. I couldn’t see that my passage with the mower made much of a difference, anyways, except that a few stalks went to seed. I could handle those by going after them with a grass clippers — the kind with the long flat blade that you could use on hedges, too.

Mowing back there, underneath the drooping branches, sickened me. It wasn’t nausea that I felt, but an itching burn all over my body, in my eyes, through my nose, and down into my lungs. My mother, who invested in allergy shots to make me into a superman who wouldn’t be fazed by all the pollen that got blown about when the mower stirred things up back there (so she thought), chided me. I had to be a hypochodriac, a shirker, a liar. She blamed the grass, that I sometimes missed a shot or two in the course of the treatment. The Brazilian pepper tree was above suspicion.

We ate of it. My father picked the leaves and the pink berries and threw them on the hot coals in the Weber barbecue to give the meat flavoring. We ate hamburgers, chicken, and steak smoked in toxicity. No one ever suspected the sickness that we felt after dining on these meals was due to the pepper’s poison. They blamed the heat, the smog, the catsup going rancid, but never the tree.

Last month when I told my mother about my discovery, she said “Your stupid grandfather ate lots of those berries and they never killed him.”

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I just did a search on Brazilian Pepper and discovered that it is regarded as a pest in many wildlife refuges and national parks. For example, this article about efforts to restore native vegetation to Sanibel Island (Brazilian Pepper is not a native but a weed species) notes:

Brazilian pepper trees (Schinus
terebinthifolius) have bright green
compound leaves. Female trees show
sprays of yellowish-white flowers in
the spring yielding to clusters of
small red berries in the fall. A multi-trunk
shrub, the pepper can grow up
to 40 feet tall. It can’t easily be
destroyed by fire, flood, drought or
chainsaw. The tree resprouts even
after it is cut down. In addition, birds
and animals easily spread its seeds.
Worse still, the tree is related to
poison ivy, poison oak, and poison
sumac, and contact with any part of it
can cause skin irritation.

Throughout my teenaged years, I struggled with asthma. Now I suspect the main source of my ills.