December 20, 2006
Trees
We’ve been watching for years a spindly fledgling volunteer oak struggling at the edge of the asphalt on our front street, waiting for an apt time to transplant it. The day came yesterday. Though all its taproot didn’t make the move, the landscaper’s root-nutrients did. Now, it’s wait and see. Does anyone pray for trees?
I suppose there was a time when I never thought much about trees except for to climb and sometimes enjoy their shade. I chainsawed a few dead ones into firewood on the place we had on the Cumberland Plateau. But geriatrophying has a way of changing all that. The older I get, the closer my sense of kinship with nature, the more anger that rouses when I see the way we and our environmentally illiterate leaders constantly insult it.
There’s a beautiful “empty” lot in our hood getting razed just so another oversized duplex (surely with four SUVs) can be planted for what once was a neat little forest with scads of birds and other beasts. The trees felled there will get chopped into fragments for the city dump. The trees that were felled elsewhere and made into lumber will replace them as joists and sills and hardwood floors and on and on and on. Lumber, another word for clumsy, is a quaint word for ex-trees, an insult in my book for what are often the epitome of gracefulness — and grace. One of my dearest friends of time past, from whom I learned much, near the end of his life got into hugging trees as if to identify with the nature of which we’re all an inseparable part. The thought has crossed my mind more than once.
CP and our yard guys just yesterday also planted five brand new shiny tall hollies on our spread and moved some of their sister and brother cedars around. Together with our new baby oak, they were a pleasant in-your-face to the scrapers down the street. I got all smug about it.