Trees I Have Loved

Earth Day!  It's actually kind of  pity that we felt it necessary to name a day to remind ourselves that we're indebted to and dependent upon the planet we live on. But I guess it's a positive step.  Today I'm thinking about the bits of Earth that I have lived on, known and loved in my lifetime.  Here's a composite picture of the mighty, mighty maple tree that grows next to Bob's house.  It is my favorite, favorite tree in all of Norman.

I'm an Oklahoma girl.  I guess you are always embued with the natural spirit of the place you come from.  My ex husband is from El Paso TX, and always had a special affinity for the desert, which to me always looked forbidding and abandoned.  But the wide open sky, red rock and scrappy trees of Oklahoma will always feel like home to me.  There's something so tough about the desert.  It's a hard place, because it has to be.  Oklahoma's tough, too, but not as hard.  Here the land ... and some of the people ... have a sort of self-deprecating "aw shucks, nuthin' much" attitude that hides a wealth of wonder.

As Oklahomans, we know that our environment doesn't have that much of a dramatic nature to distinguish it.  Our land is flat, but not as flat as Kansas (which some students at MIT did a study on a few years ago and determined that it was, in fact, flatter than a pancake).  We've got a lot of rivers, but not a lot of big, impressive rivers.  Some of them flow mostly through a layer of sand, or dry up completely in the brutal summers. Our mountains are short, lumpy and really, really old.  Our lakes are mostly manmade. Our trees are largely scrubby, twisted and not much to look at.

Yet the whole adds up to a landscape that is incredibly diverse, if unassuming.  Salt flats and sand dunes, piney woods and desert scrub, granite mountain and tall grass prairie.  None of it with the sweeping drama of MGM, but something special, nonetheless.

When I was in school in North Carolina I was amazed at the forest.  All those trees!  And their trees grew so much taller than our trees.  Trees of the same species would be twice the height in NC as in OK.  I guess with ample water, and without the wind raging up from the southeast all the time to keep them hunkered down, North Carolina's trees felt free to just stretch out and keep on stretching.  I loved to walk in the woods there when the wind was blowing hard up above.  Below all was peace, but you could hear the wind rushing through the canopy above, and if you placed your hands on the trunk of a pine tree, you could feel it sway, all the way to the roots.


In Oklahoma I was always partial to the scrappy blackjack oak.  post oak.  scrub oak, Crosstimbers... they go by  many names.  Pioneers hated them because they were virtually impassable, with an understory thick with greenbriar and venomous snakes.  They're useless for timber, and a little bit funny-looking, with their twisted branches like crooked fingers and their black bark and dark, tough leaves.There was one on my uncle's farm that grew a little way out into a pasture by itself, where a big owl lived.  If you were lucky you'd hear it, or maybe even see it swoop overhead when you went walking at night near the tree.  The tree it roosted in was a dense, squat thing, black against the sky and scarred with broken limbs, scabbed bark and dead patches, but still hanging on.  I always thought it looked old and wise.  I wonder if it still stands.


On the outskirts of Norman, there's this tree I've been watching for a year. It was dead when I met it, last November, but dead in a pretty striking spectacular way:  black arms against a cloudy sky, and full of crows.  I went back in March and it was much diminished, limbs broken and collapsed, the bark stripping away to reveal the gray wood underneath. Today I went back and it is almost completely without bark, though it doesn't seem to have lost any more major limbs.

November 2010

February 2011

Today

When I was a kid, my dad planted a willow tree outside my window.  And as it grew, he carefully trained a few of its branches to make a comfy seat for me.  By the time I was nine or ten, the tree was big enough to climb, and I spent hours in that leafy seat, reading books or just being with the tree.  Then one year I broke a branch, swinging from it, and the tree got sick.  Beetles or disease got to it, and it began to die.  Finally, my dad had to have it cut down, and I couldn't watch.  After they carried it out, all cut to pieces, I went out and sat on the stump and cried. I felt like I had lost an old friend... and worse, that I was somehow responsible for the tree's death, because of that branch I broke. That I had betrayed my tree in some way.  I still have a strip of my willow's dried leaves pressed in a scrap book in a box in my garage, and pictures of my tree in its last days before we cut it down.

I wish I could have planted a willow for Grayson, that he could be climbing and loving now.  We did plant a sycamore at the house on 20th street, but even though it grew fast, it was still not big enough to climb when we left. Maybe soon we'll be able to plant one together.

Anyway, it's Earth Day.  And I'm thinking about trees.