A Tree. For Me??

I have a thing for trees. It's grown slowly over the years, like a tree does.

You may remember the huge red oak that grew by our mailbox. I certainly do. She was big once, when our children were small, and we waited for the bus beneath her friendly limbs.

This one is worth reading: Remembering the Oak.

But if you don't go read that, here's a fragment: 

This is how I will remember her, guardian of our driveway, stately landmark of our ridge road. I'll remember her shading a bluebird box, sheltering families of birds, lizards, insects, mammals, and four humans, often as not wearing a hawk in her hair.

 Forming attachments to people, to individual creatures, trees, even beef cattle...for better or worse, it's what I do. And when the woodpecker hits the window glass, when the tree comes crashing down, when the truck comes for that old tired bull, well, it's hard. But it is better to love and lose, they say, than never to love at all.

This isn't really a post about losing something. It's about loving things. I got plenty of lovin'.

I think you'll remember The Three Graces, trees that adorn a rise near my home. I photograph them in every light regime, every weather condition, and they have grown very dear to me. From left to right, they're red maple, sugar maple, and black tupelo.

To me, they are dancing ladies, each with her own rhythm and style.

I shouldn't say this in their presence, but I do have a favorite.  It's the one on the far right.

The black tupelo, who dances like Pigpen. 

Here's how they looked this morning:

 I am agog and amazed that I get to see such beautiful things every day. That I am able to get out in the fleeting hours that the sun shines and record such wonders. Hard to believe that was this morning, as a cold rain hits the window.

Traces of her famed autumn color are beginning to touch her hi-gloss leaves. She'll go maroon, then brightest crimson.

I moved around to get the sun on my beloved tupelo, only to find her top cresting and falling like a rogue wave. Who knew?

What a tree. I wonder if anyone else who drives by this grace-filled trio every day stops to cherish it?

So it is a piece of karmic perfection that the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio, has for reasons known only to them decided to honor me this coming Saturday, October 11, 2014, by dedicating 

not one

not two

but an entire grove of black tupelos

to me. Zick. Whawhat?

When I first got the call two years ago I thought there must be some mistake. Don't I have to die first for an honor like that, for a bronze plaque with a little epitaph on it beneath a grove of beautiful tupelo? Don't I have to do something of real consequence? 

They assured me they had the right person. 

And in my heart, if only for the depth of my love for trees, I think they must. 

The tree dedication ceremony happens first, and immediately afterward, at 2 pm, I'll be speaking in the Visitor's Center at Dawes Arboretum. That part is open to the public, and Bill, Liam and I would be delighted to see you there. Find out more here. 

I wrote a little haiku, an epitaph for the plaque. Though last I checked I'm still alive.

The tupelo’s full

Of small blue fruits, offered up

For birds to carry

Like our words, aimless

‘Til they are taken, consumed

Planted in new minds

We must bear fruit, too

Some words, a painting, a song

To disperse this joy

With another favorite tree, the pawpaw. Thank you, Dawes Arboretum, for this honor.

Come see me Saturday, if you can!

Remembering the Oak

I counted the cut end--103 rings. Humbling, awe-inspiring. The red oak was here in 1908, four years before my Dad was born.

And now, because there are cameras on the bus, and dogs are not allowed to board, Chet uses her lower trunk as a place to watch and make sure the Caped One gets off to school all right.

Yes, there he is, waving to his mom and doggeh.

See you tonight, little brother.

And in the churned-up soil beneath her rotten roots, I found a Liberty head dime, dated 1903, minted in Pittsburgh, with all its scarring worth only about $1.80, but like the red oak, priceless to me.

I'm left alone with the old coin, a tree's carcass and the memories.

This is how I will remember her, guardian of our driveway, stately landmark of our ridge road. I'll remember her shading a bluebird box, sheltering families of birds, lizards, insects, mammals, and four humans, often as not wearing a hawk in her hair.

I'll remember how she made an ordinary spot into a destination, a meeting place

How she made it all feel like home. One tree, deeply appreciated for the 19 years we had with her. Our time together was far too short, but with ones so dearly loved, it's always that way.

The Leaning Tree

 Yes, she had a distinct lean to the east. This is my last photo of the great red oak, taken on February 26, 2011. It's a perilous lean. But she'd been leaning for years, and I told myself that that's what some old trees do.

 A couple of times Bill mentioned that he thought she was leaning worse than he'd ever seen, and I had to agree. I took a couple of photos to document it. I guess we both knew the end was coming.

 That little noose hanging down is a remnant of a tire swing that our neighbor Gail, now in his 50's, said they swung on as kids. It's a steel cable. The stories this tree could tell...

When the original owners of our homestead had a thriving orchard, with apples, peaches and bing cherries, they used to put a big keg of cider out under the oak with a dipper and a box for collections.

 February 7, 2011. A pearly morning, the oak standing sentinel, no tracks yet on the clean white page of the day.

Saturday, March 26. Bill, Liam and I are having a Rain Crows weekend in Lakeside, Ohio. We're recording 14 original songs for a demo, having the time of our lives. Phoebe is staying in town. No one is home to witness it. The tree goes down. This is what we see when we come up our road on Sunday, fresh from a weekend of music and friendship.

There are no words.

She's fallen, and the town crews have cut her in half and swung the gigantic stump around so she's not blocking the road. And there she lies to this day.

The next morning, Phoebe and I went out as to a wake, and I shot her against the sunrise. Bluebird box and mailbox miraculously intact. She was a lady to the end.

I came again and again to her, especially after a light snow settled to soften the starkness.

It took four days for me to be able to look on her without weeping. Now, a kind of numbness has settled in.

Waiting for the bus is not the same. It has a sadness, one that only increases as the days begin to warm and she tries to leaf out from fallen twigs.

 Chet Baker makes the best of any situation. He enjoys climbing on the oak's carcass.

That little dog knows how to cheer Mether up. He poses shamelessly.

Find Chet Baker in the photo below.

Yes, you are a magnificent doggeh. And I would like to be more like you in spirit, but I am human, and I grieve.

 Do not grieve, Mether. It is a tree, and it fell down, and now it is a jungle gym.

Here are the roots. You can see the brown rot, presumably wrought by the chicken-of-the-woods fungus.

At the end, she had barely any roots to hang on, barely any heart inside.

All the neighbors tell us that the first eight to ten feet of this tree is absolutely full of metal--fencing, cables, spikes... making her extremely dangerous to process with a chainsaw.

So there she lies. A local guy hacked away at her for a little while, then quit. We don't own the land she's on, so it's hard to figure out just what to do with a carcass weighing many tons and run through with metal. But she's a hazard where she is, blocking our view of an increasingly busy road. She needs to go.

I would like her gone. I would like to be able to replace her with a strong young thing, to not be reminded each time we approach or leave our home of just what we've lost in this beautiful tree.

Many have suggested making furniture out of her...thank you. We lack the technology to do that, but perhaps we'll find a way to salvage something. We're not there yet, not ready for the new puppy. We miss the old dog too much.

Trouble in the Oak

In October of 2007, a big vibrantly colored fungal growth appeared on our oak. I duly cooked and served a good part of it, for it was the purportedly delectable chicken-of-the-woods.

Part of me hoped I was eating the enemy's heart.

  

 I knew the sudden appearance of this spectacular fungus was a bad, bad sign for our tree; even said as much in my post about the experience. I wrote:  Chicken of the Woods, for all its homey name, is a serious tree pathogen, which infects and kills trees with brown rot. Buhhhmer. I hope it's slow-acting. We love this old oak, which shades our mail (good for shipping mealworms in summer) and the bluebird box.

And in a bit of history that now pleases me with its symmetry, the mushroom made me sick as a dog that night and part of the next day.

Looking at it, it doesn't look like something one should probably eat.

 All right, it made me sick because I paired it with a nice sauvignon blanc, and I was unaware that that’s a no-no with this particular mushroom. But still. We writers look for foreshadowing wherever we can.

Still, three more springs and summers and winters came and went, and the tree sheltered us, appearing in my photos when I was planning to include it

And even when I wasn’t. (Tree photobomber).

It watched Bill teach Liam to throw (not a fait accompli as yet)

It made its own island of habitat for northern fence lizards and many kinds of birds and animals, who perched in its branches, drilled nest cavities in its limbs, and fed on its caterpillars and acorns. Gray and fox squirrels, redtails and red-shouldered hawks, crows, bluebirds, red-bellied woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, mourning doves; even a scarlet tanager who made it his song perch every summer morning in 2010. Everyone wanted to perch in the oak, for it was the highest point around.

Oak prominent moth larva.

 I could not imagine our entry without it. I hoped it would be true, as my DOD used to say, that trees are 50 years growing, 50 years living, and 50 years dying. Then I wouldn't have to say good-bye.

The Driveway Oak

From the most basic to the most deeply spiritual level, it defined our home, the big red oak tree at the end of the driveway. Anyone coming here for the first time knew that it marked the right turn into our drive, wrote “big oak tree” on their directions. But it was so much more than a landmark. It was our friend.

In preparing these posts, I scanned the past two years’ worth of photos. There are many, many more, I’m sure, buried on those external hard drives I should be using. These are enough, I think, to tell the story of what one tree meant to us.

Winter, it was a stark giant, spreading heavy branches against a bleak landscape, casting its shadow across fresh snow. Always, it dwarfed us, but in a friendly giant way, a sheltering way.

 We loved the rhythm of its branches, the way they hung down like a skirt, and we loved seeing its bones revealed when the last brown leaf finally blew off it in November. It marked the sunrise for us, because this is where we wait for the bus every morning, August through early June.

.

We know how lucky we are to have a bus pick our kids up right at the end of our driveway. The first day of kindergarten for Liam; Phoebe heading back, a seasoned but very excited pro.

 The oak, a great wooden granny, watching for the big yellow bus, leaning with anticipation, it seemed. And off they’d go, and the oak would stroke the bus roof with its leaves, waving farewell.

 The oak sheltered us in rain and warmed us in the cold. If we backed right up against the east side of its trunk on a sunny cold winter morning, it blocked the wind and held the sun for us.

When the mornings got warm, we’d stay in its shade, and Liam would lose himself in Harry Potter or Wimpy Kid, only looking up when the bus rumbled up, a rooster tail of dust rising behind it. The oak gave us a place to be, a pool of cool, an umbrella over us as we waited.

There is more to the story, the difficulty being winnowing it all down, distilling 19 years of true love for a tree into just a few lines, a few of hundreds of images. The difficulty being having to do it.