These days I wake to November grays. Most backyard trees are stripped of leaves, except for one: the volunteer Japanese maple. It waits until the other trees are done to strut its stuff.
This is how it’s done, kids, it seems to say. With these scarlets, these jewel tones. With this patience and this grace.
Am I reading too much into the timing of this turning? Of course I am. I always do.
On a walk this afternoon I spent more time than I intended trying to photograph leaves in flight. So many of them are swirling around that it seems I should be able to capture at least one or two mid-journey.
But either the light isn’t right, or they’re eddying about frantically rather than gently floating to the earth. Just as often, I spy the perfect slow-descending leaf but by the time I pull out my camera, it’s too late.
It’s a delicate business, like capturing a single snowflake or the down of a thistle. Perhaps it’s best left to chance.
It took a poison ivy search to bring them to light, a careful combing of the backyard in preparation for a children’s party here this weekend. At first I didn’t know what they were, saw only the fallen petals, tiny blossoms in the grass.
Then I looked up, saw the bent boughs of the crepe myrtle shining in the sun. It’s my $2 tree, one of the stock I purchased from the Arbor Day Foundation years ago and planted without much hope. It’s 20 feet tall … and it’s blooming.
Vibrant pink flowers are weighing down the spindly top of the unpruned tree, blooming earlier than the other crepe myrtles in the yard, which are, unfortunately, planted in the shade.
But this little guy inherited the sun, grabbed the rays when the big oaks came down. He is reaping the harvest. We all are.
How many shades of green do I see in a day at the beach. There is the dark forest of the mangrove, its roots in water, clustered in wet spots along the road.
There is the purplish-green of the sea grape, its leaves catching light, making tunnels of shade as I exit the strand.
There is the striated green of the palmetto, wagging in the wind.
And sometimes, in the morning, there is the green of the sea.
Wind whips the leaves off the witch hazel tree, sets them spinning down into a pile of gold.
Wind bends the tulip poplar and the bamboo, which is taking bows outside my office window.
Wind sets the jets on an alternate course, sends them scudding, like the clouds, over this house.
Trees, planes, clouds — may all that belongs aloft … stay that way.
The world is in turmoil. Winter is right around the corner. Time for some positivity, which comes today in the form of a vegetable.
I’ve mourned the trees as they’ve fallen. Now to celebrate the sunniness that has come in their wake.
There’s no better proof of this than the plump zucchini that managed to thrive in the back garden. In fact, it became so large that the only palatable way to eat it will be grated in bread or pancakes.
Still, this is a milestone. I’m not yet rushing out to plant a vegetable garden, but I’ll begin to think of the backyard not as a shady place … but as a sunny one.
There are stands of ancient hemlocks in New Germany State Park, an oasis of green trails and lofty heights. A cathedral of a forest.
Sometimes I feel like a documentarian. My subject: the felling of trees in my neighborhood. This is not a job I sought or welcomed, but when the giants go, I want to record their passing. After all, they have shaded us for decades, have been beautifying this place for a century or more. Some of them are over 100 feet tall, and I treasure them.
The one meeting its maker today is visible from my office window. I write this post to the sound of chainsaw and wood grinder. The tree is healthy, but its owner fears it might fall on his house. And who can blame him, since a tree fell on the house of his neighbors and damaged it so mightily that they had to move out for months.
It’s a little like shuttling old folks to the assisted living center earlier rather than later. Prophylactic placement, or in this sense prophylactic felling. All I know is, once again I’m recording the soon-to-be-gone.
After rhapsodizing yesterday about tree tunnels and way stations, I learned that one of these shady spots had a defector. Another giant fallen. This on a cloudless, breezeless day, not long after I walked by.
I’m not surprised at the toppling. The tree (I’m trying to identify it from its leaves — maybe a cottonwood?) had been leaning for years, and had reached such a precipitous angle that it was only a matter of time before gravity got the better of it.
The trees in my neighborhood can be 80 to 100 feet tall. When one comes down, it can smash a roof or block the street. In this case, since it happened only a few feet before an intersection, it effectively shut down access to the outside world.
Help was soon on the way. Before you could shout “timber” the thick trunk was chainsawed and pulled out of the way. But this tall, shade-producer, leaning and bent though it was, had become a companion on my walks, a landmark of sorts. Now it’s only lumber and mulch.
One of the tall old trees we lost last year was a prime display tree, the perfect reflector for the fading light of sunset. During numerous deck dinners through the years, our oldest daughter would stop the conversation, point to this particular oak, and say “look at the light on that tree.”
Its cousins might have been dark and nondescript at this point in the early evening, but this tree’s spot in the yard was perfectly calibrated for late-day light; it looked as if it was lit up from within.
The play of light on its trunk is one of the lingering losses from that oaks’ felling last September. More than the tree itself, I miss what we saw in it. Aren’t many losses like that?
