We'll Take the Stumps
By Becky Morquecho
@beckymorquecho
The skin on my hands is scraped and raw, but it’s too late to grab the gloves. I need to get this hunk of wood up the hill, and I’m not sure I can. I kick off a chunk of the dense, mossy bark that’s making it tip and wobble, before giving another push. Sweat is soaking the inside brim of my hat. My boots are caked in mud from the recent rains. And I love it all. The physicality of living on six acres satisfies something in me I didn’t even know was missing.
My daughter stands on a nearby boulder, like a majestic queen or a camp counselor, “You can do it! You can do it!” I’m rolling tree stumps from a pile halfway down the gravel driveway to our sacred spot under the oak trees. So far, our playground consists of a paint-splattered picnic table, a hammock swing, and a green slide we’ve shimmied and sunk into the dirt hill, but these stumps are what we’ve been waiting for.
I’m not on Pinterest much, but if you saw my searches, you’d find “Jungalow bedroom” and an array of beautifully designed natural play spaces. Log balance beams. Stump tables and chairs. Ropes, rocks, and trees all intertwined—simply, but purposefully—to create a masterpiece of the great outdoors in a magical space for kids to explore. It’s art, really. Maybe that’s why I love the idea so much. When my husband and I started dreaming about houses, we each wrote down the things we wanted and compared notes.
His list included: space, potential, and not too far from friends.
My list included: space, light, fruit trees, and a stump playground.
***
For seven years, we lived in a house that didn’t have much of a yard. Rather than stepping into a wooded forest where ferns and wildflowers grow—like I did in my daydreams—you walked out the front door onto a small slab of concrete, and that was pretty much the extent of it. There was just enough space for a couple of chairs and a small table.
I strung twinkle lights, hung plants, and covered every inch of the gray cement with succulents and fuschia bougainvilleas. We painted rocks on that patio. We built a mud kitchen. We practiced ABCs with chalk and drew bike tracks. Anytime I felt like the walls holding up those 850 square feet were closing in, and the poison of discontentment trickled into my veins, I’d rearrange flower pots, forage a new piece of nature to hang on the door, or turn the hose on jet and blast away the faded chalk until it bled beyond the edges of the sidewalk. A fresh start for our space. A clean slate for my heart.
But I always dreamed of more for our family and asked God for it often: trees to swing from, paths to discover, space for all of us to breathe and expand.
One day, on a typical walk around a nearby neighborhood, my daughter and I chatted as we collected leaves, acorns, and anything else scattered on the sidewalk we found beautiful. As she squatted down to sweep and scoop a pile of pine needles from the evergreen towering above us, I noticed some of the branches were freshly cut. My eyes darted from the path below covered in treasures, up the neighbor’s hillside to the front yard, which was now covered with tree stumps.
“Ver! Look!” I said, pointing up the hill.
“Wow, Mama. That’s a lot of stumps.”
You’d think I’d just won the lottery. Apparently, one man’s firewood is more than enough to get a woman excited.
We walked home holding hands, and I told my daughter about my idea.
As we made our way through the front gate, careful to step around her latest dinosaur chalk drawings, I smiled at our modest patio and all the life it’d so graciously given us. Sometimes, just a whisper of inspiration is enough to magnify the goodness you’ve already been given. I opened the front door and asked Vera to get paper, markers, stickers, and an envelope. We met back at the kitchen table.
“What are their names? What if they say no?!” she asked.
We talked about how they might say no, or how we might not even hear back. But, we decided that wasn’t a good enough reason not to ask.
Dear Neighbor,
We are the Morquecho family: Jesse, Becky, and Vera. We live a couple of streets away.
As we were taking a walk, we noticed all of your tree stumps. They are beautiful and we’re wondering if we could have any extras you are not using for our yard!
Feel free to text or call anytime. 760-XXX-XXXX.
Thank you!
The Morquechos
When we finished writing, I showed her how to fold the paper in thirds so it fits in the envelope. She eagerly covered it with Mickey Mouse stickers and out the door we went.
With a spring in our step, we hurried down our hill, took a left and then hustled two more blocks away from home. Vera opened our mystery neighbor’s mailbox and carefully placed the envelope inside, like if the edges and corners matched up just perfectly to the metal frame, they might just say yes.
“This could take some time,” I told her. “We don’t know how often they check the mail.”
A day went by. Nothing.
“Mama, have you heard about the stumps yet?” she asked every few hours.
“Not yet.”
Then, one afternoon, while we were out on the patio, making up songs and snapping sticks for mud cake birthday candles, I heard a ding. I walked over to my phone, flipped it screen side up and saw the text:
“Hi Becky. This is Tony, with the stumps. Help yourselves.”
We drove to Tony’s house, picked out our favorite stumps, and headed home. I lined them up in a row against the fence, about eight inches apart from one another. Vera’s eyes sparkled with excitement as she looked up at mine, grabbed my hand, and stepped up onto that first stump. She cautiously hopped to the next one. And then the next.
I smiled, satisfied. She beamed with confidence, “I got this now, Mama.”
***
After four months, endless hours on Redfin, and hundreds of texts to our realtor, our ninth offer on a house was finally accepted. Each of those first eight homes was sweet and beautiful in its own way, and at the time, we really thought every single one could have been the one. Yet, this morning when I looked out, nature and space wiped the sleep from their eyes and stretched their arms wide, generously offering the purest, simplest peace. Eight no’s to get this yes, and God had known all along.
As I walked down our country driveway and under a tunnel of oak trees; the warm morning light kissed my face as I stepped out of the shade. A red-tailed hawk circled above. The air was crisp and quiet. I prayed, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
***
In the weeks between getting the keys and moving in, our fixer-upper became a party house. Roofers. Painters. A rodent guy. Chimney sweeps. As we walked the property with the arborist, past the boulders and cactus with fruit the color of rubies, he pointed out the trees that needed to go. There were three.
“After we cut them down, do you want us to take them away?” he asked. “Or, leave the stumps here for you?”
The question was laughable.
But there’s no way he could have known that a year prior, we loaded tree stumps in the trunk of our Subaru on Tony’s driveway, trying to Tetris our way to max capacity. He couldn’t have known that I rolled those precious five hunks of wood—that’s all the Forester could hold—over the concrete patio and positioned them just right, so my daughter could hop from one to the next. He couldn’t have known about the other eight offers, or the disappointments, or my dream house list, or the prayers of things hoped for.
But God knew.
My husband’s eyes shined, as he smiled at me and said to him, “We’ll take the stumps.”
Words and photo by Becky Morquecho. Becky is a wife to Jesse (yes, just like Full House), an adoptive mama, an adventurer and the host of the We Are Free podcast. She loves fuchsia bougainvilleas, Mediterranean salads and swinging in the hammock under the oak tree. She believes there is beauty and goodness just waiting to be discovered and writes about it often.