TREES

Just a few minutes ago, I stood at my back door with tears in my eyes watching the sliding sun leave a rosy blush on the trees across my back fence. The teers were because I was remembering the first summer I lived in my house, when this was a fantasy come true, a dream I almost didn't believe would be realized. What I wanted most in the world was a safe little house where I could raise my little daughter. She was three at the time. I wanted a backyard for her to play in, grass, not concrete. This house had everything, a big yard that spanned five other backyards across the back of the lot. It is a pie shaped property, so in the front, my yard is only the width of ten or twelve sidewalk squares, but it fans out gloriously across the back with, now, dozens of trees, both deciduous and evergreen.

The ones that made me cry were the spindly West Virginia cedars. I brought them home from my father and mother's hilltop ten acres in Maysville, W.Va. Do you remember the popular coffee cups that had a hard plastic holder and paper cone cups that went inside? Well four little cedars came here in those cups, tiny hopeful little things. They didn't thrive at first. In fact one of them didn't make it. But the other three hung on and adapted to their new environment and although the bottom ten feet or so of their trunks are bare, lovely shaped teepees of cedar branches live at the top. I remember the day my father and I planted those little trees. It was my wish then to have trees along the entire perimeter of that back fences and it has almost been realized both by my efforts and the natural growth of some tourist trees that came to stay.

There are a few Christmas trees from the eyars my daughte and I bought root ball Christmas trees and planted them after Christmas. Some years the ground froze and we made cloth hearts to decorate the Christmas trees in the living room until the spring thaw then we planted the trees in the yard. There is a tree from Williamsburg, Virginia froma family vacation to Disneyland, and that tree also came home in a paper cone cup, that's how small they were those trees. That ttree is now far taller than the rooftops of my house or my neighbors. The trees are like kindly neighbors to me, quiet, unassuming, only periodically troublesome through no fault of their own when violent winds rip off a branch or two and fling them down on us.

From the first year I moved in here, dire predictions were made by many that a tree would fall on my house. Of course they never did. It was one of the things people said as they cut down their trees up and down the block. Mostly they didn't want to be bothered with the leaves in the fall. I LOVE the leaves, the quiet red and gold snow fall of leaves drifting and sailing to the ground to form the aromatic carpet. I have favorite views of trees from every window in this house. Every room in this little cube of a house has two windows overlooking trees and every wall has outside of it a large maple tree about two feet from the roof line. The trees embrace me.

The cats and I enjoy watching the wild and crazy squirrels race up and down the trunks like Gran Prix race car drivers, making mad aerial circus leaps from branch to branch. When I sit on the porch in spring and autumn befoe and after the mosquitos, birds come to visit me, mostly wrens, but sometimes a cardinal. Mp/> To me there is no fragrance that can compare to the scent of sunlight on pine needles in the pine woods in the summer. I miss the forest, where in younger, fitter days I liked to hike, almost every week, but fortunaely I have prepared for my old age by bringing some forest into my life and my yard. I have maples, oaks, arborvitae, Norfolk Pine, some kind of ordinary evergreens, the Christmas trees, the aforementioned West Virginia cedars, lots of holly trees, and several kinds of trees I have never learned to name.

My Meetig is starting a oook club in mid February and our selection is IN SEARCH OF THE MOTHER TREE. Often, I don't read books about trees because they have too much about logging and de-forestation and it makes me deeply sad. I have, however read a lot of tree books that simply discuss affectionately, the lives of trees, a German forester, Wohleben, has written one such book, but I can't remember the title. And I read a book once that talked about the medicinal forests of Japan where specific trees have been known to effect healing for certain diseases and people afflicted with these diseases go there to walk. The treess are healing, even the yeard trees, and often when I have taken my troubled soul to the porch, just sitting with the trees has healed me.

We never, thought, my father and I, the day we planted those little cedars, that a day would come when I would be an old gray haired woman and he would be dead. I couldn't have imagined anyone with the vitality and strength of my father getting old and dying. I can't imagine it for myself!

One of my first artistic experiences, of which I have written many times before, was in the Dickensian overcrowded brick factory public school I attneded as a small depressed child in the concrete canyons of South Philadelphia. We took leaves from trees, each block had one tree imprisoned in a square of earth surrounded by concrete blocks, if the tree hadn't already died. Our was alive and even housed birds. It was a maple and I can still see the red hand shaped leaves I brought to school. We brought old toothbrushes from home as well, and we dipped the toothrushes into tempera paint and brushed them across small wood framed screens over the leaves laid on construction paper, making a silhouette of the leaves amidst the speckled snow of paint. It was a miraculous event and made me into the artist I became.

That is what it means to live in a place for a long time, to get to know the trees and plants, to watch the trees you plant mature, to have memories connected to them. You built, like a nest, your little environment. It evolves around you.

When the snow is gone and spring comes, why not plant a tree in your yard and watch it grow?

Happy Trails, Jo Ann