After a moment, my mother nodded and stepped out of the car into the rain.
A few years later my grandmother died, and sometime after that so did my mother, and now I am forty years old, older than my mother was then. I don’t have a daughter and I don’t know if I ever will. But if I do, we will not carry this sadness forward. I’m tired of holding it.
* * *
—
I don’t love the bank of mock orange behind the house on Todd Lane. Mock orange is not a tree, it’s a shrub, but its flowers have a similar sweet scent. Gardening catalogs will tell you it’s an old favorite, perhaps not fitting for a more modern landscape, but sure to bring up much nostalgia in a more traditional setting. You can decide if you want that or not.
Arbotchery
Most people can’t identify more than three trees local to their area. Maybe every profession has something equivalent that leaves its practitioners stunned. Builders might marvel at my inability to distinguish between wrenches, for example. But trees are some of the most extraordinary living things on earth. So are blue whales, but few people get to see them. Unless you live in a desert, you probably see a tree every day. It’s only because trees are common that we don’t appreciate them, and yet if they weren’t common, our planet would be uninhabitable, at least by humans as we recognize them. Some trees can absorb 40 percent of the water they need from fog and have bark thick enough to withstand the heat of a forest fire. Yet Samuel Johnson defined a tree as “a large vegetable rising, with one woody stem, to a considerable height,” a dreadful description from an otherwise great writer. It seems the trees’ plight is to be always underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.
An example: it is possible to do the needed pruning around power lines without making bad cuts to the trees, but the people who do the work are often paid by the mile and move too fast. The resulting tree shapes can be troubling, not to mention harmful. A few years ago Blake and I started documenting the worst local examples of what we named arbotchery, the severe and heartless pruning of trees around wires, leaving them stunted and misshapen forever.
The new owners of the Goulds’ house had recently taken out a badly arbotched tree, a decision I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, the tree looked ridiculous, a small sugar maple (Acer saccharum) sheared into a slope. On the other hand, it was a sugar maple. The leaves on the branches that were left turned scarlet every fall.
I asked Blake what he thought. We were filling all the beds around the Green with impatiens (Impatiens walleriana).
He shrugged. “Was it unstable?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hard to say.”
Graduation was a week away and the coral and white impatiens were part of the decorations, as fragile as crepe paper. The Super Elfin cultivar was bred in Costa Rica, developed from its native wild form into one of the most popular annuals in the world. I’m not a fan of annuals under the best of circumstances—they are an enormous amount of work for a few weeks of color—and my scorn for the impatiens is second only to my contempt for the petunia, an annual that is equally fragile but also sticky.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Blake said, his voice serious and quiet. “It isn’t just the yew. Have you noticed the Douglas fir by the science building? Or the blue spruce by the auditorium?”
I shook my head.
He said recent measurements indicated those trees, too, were growing much faster than they should have been. Blake had talked with several people at the U.S. Forest Service about what he was noticing on campus and they told him recent measurements from around the world showed mature evergreens of all species now regularly exceeding previously recorded height records by twenty to thirty feet.
“Why?” I asked.
Blake settled a little coral impatiens bursting with buds into the soil. “Global warming,” he said. “I think they’re trying to save us.”
I pretended to have some trouble getting the next seedling out of its flat so he wouldn’t see my eyes filling with water.
We worked for a while in silence and then, without pausing in his planting, Blake said, “I don’t think I’d ever take out a sugar maple.”
Postcards
I ran into Philip Gould in front of his old house later that week. I was taking an evening walk, working on my redeemable element game, when I saw him standing in the road with a shovel. I thought he might be missing the sugar maple, but when I got closer I realized he was scraping at a dead rabbit in the road. When he saw me he stopped working and said, in lieu of a greeting, that he’d seen the rabbit hit by a car earlier in the day and had to do something about it.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
“We had a rabbit in the yard for years. We put food out sometimes. I think this might be the one.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Beth is in the hospital.”
“Oh, no.”
“She had a stroke. A minor one. They think she’s going to be all right.” He shook his head. “There’s no way of knowing for sure,” he said. “About the rabbit, I mean.”
I almost said that I’d seen lots of rabbits around Duck Woods, but it wouldn’t have been true. The rabbit in the road was so smushed I had to look away. I told him I would be thinking about him and Beth. Philip nodded and went back to his work, lifting as much of the rabbit as he could into a shoebox.
I walked the entire perimeter of Duck Woods—the length of Founders Avenue, left on Huron, which follows the river, left again on Jefferson, which skirts the railroad tracks back up to Todd Lane—but when I got home I could still see that bloody rabbit in my mind.
There were two postcards in the mail. The first one was from my brother. On the back of a photograph of the Pioneer Cabin Tree in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, he’d written, “I loved your postcard.” The photo was an old one, black and white, from the time when cars were allowed to drive through the tunnel carved into the tree. The postcard showed a Ford Model T in the tunnel, which was clever. My brother had always been jealous that our mother taught me to drive. “You got her best years,” he used to say. And it was true.
I was suddenly so tired I closed the door and sat down right there in the front hall. That part of the house always makes me feel detached, unmoored. Someone else might have tried to meditate, but I can’t. Hester came over and sniffed my knee, then circled behind me, bumping the side of her body against my back. She circled and purred until I stood up. Hester wasn’t alive when my mother died, but I swear she doesn’t like the front hall either. I got her as a kitten a few years afterward and named her for Hestia, goddess of family and home. Hestia was the daughter of Rhea, who, it’s interesting to note, had no particular activity under her control.
The front hall isn’t large, it’s more of a vestibule. If you stand at the front door and look into the house, there is a table and mirror to the right, a center hallway in front of you leading to the living room and kitchen at the back of the house, and to the left is the dining room. The staircase begins in the hall and rises to the left to a landing edged with a balustrade, then turns right up to the second-floor hallway. Off that hallway are three bedrooms and a bathroom. The bedroom I’ve used since my mother died overlooks the front yard. It was my brother’s, and other than taking down his posters so that the walls are bare, I’ve never decorated it. When Balzac was a poor writer in Paris he lived in a garret and inscribed on his bare walls notes on the things he wanted to own one day. “Rosewood paneling.” “Picture by Raphael.” I haven’t even done that.
I wondered if my brother knew the Pioneer Cabin Tree had fallen a few years ago, felled by a storm. It sh
attered on impact, but scientists estimated it was more than a thousand years old. I put the postcard on top of my father’s tree sheets and decided to see the whole episode as progress.
The second postcard was from Leo.
The Right Evergreen
I’d been avoiding Leo, not sure what to do about his first postcard. My father had kept up his El Puerto schedule, though, and had told me that the restaurant was being threatened by a developer who had not only purchased the whole mall but the dell behind it. He wanted to bulldoze the mall, level the dell, and build a large unit of luxury condominiums. My father said students, fueled by spring fever and El Puerto margaritas, were regularly protesting in the Wayside parking lot and business for Leo, at least for now, was good.
I drove by the next afternoon to see for myself.
Pushed right up against Leo’s promenade, huge and unsightly and flanked by the planters he’d bought in the fall, which were still empty, was one of those snow mounds that refuse to melt and seem to change physical properties as the season progresses. It was soot black with some fabric poking out of it, a couple of crushed cans, a shoe, and some silver tinsel. It seemed crazy that it should still be here in May, but we’d had a late snowstorm and temperatures had been chilly. Leo was out with a few of the guys from the kitchen throwing salt at it. One of them brought out a pot of hot water, and then another one. I watched from my car for about ten minutes and in that time, between the salt and the water, they brightened it up and managed to reduce its height by about a foot. I could tell from his posture Leo wasn’t happy. I felt sorry for him. Icebergs all over the world were shrinking, but not this thing.
On his second postcard he’d written: “We miss you. Come back soon. Leo and the Promenade.” Again the picture showed the yew, in a different season and at a different angle, but there it was.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MONDAY I took the postcard with me to El Puerto. The restaurant was busy, but after a short wait Leo seated me at a table on the promenade. When he brought my burrito, I had the postcard out on the table. I put my finger on the yew.
He smiled. “So it is the right one. Your father said you loved that tree.”
“He did?” I was surprised my father would share that. “Did he say why?”
Leo shook his head. “I thought I had the wrong evergreen when I didn’t hear from you.”
“He told me you might lose the restaurant,” I said.
Leo closed his eyes. “Yes. Maybe. We don’t know yet. There are some protests being planned.”
“I noticed your pots. I could plant them, if you’d like.”
He smiled but said, “Flowers won’t help.”
“Flowers always help,” I said.
Leo gestured at the postcard. “What is special about that tree?”
“It’s hard to explain. Have you seen it?”
“I don’t get onto campus much.” The extension class he was taking wasn’t even on campus, but in a community center north of town. “But I could.”
I told him I was going on another visit soon.
“Are you leaving this weekend?”
“No.”
“Well then. Sunday?”
* * *
—
LEO BROUGHT A BACKPACK with a picnic packed inside. He spread a blanket and gestured for me to sit. He took out two iced teas, some fruit, and two carefully wrapped sandwiches.
While we ate I told him the story of the yew, where it came from, how I’d acquired it, how I’d taken care of it. I pointed out the sheltering Sitka spruce. I even told him about the growth rate, which didn’t seem to surprise him. He was suitably impressed by all of it.
“The sign is wrong,” I said.
He squinted in its direction.
“This is a male yew. There are no berries on a male yew.”
“Yews can be male or female?”
I nodded. “And this one’s male.”
“Then why—”
“Some evidence suggests that the Fortingall Yew is becoming female—one small branch at the top has produced berries—so the university lawyers said the sign had to cover all potentialities.”
“But this yew is male?” Leo pointed at my yew.
“Yes. And the yew in Scotland is changing sex only after three thousand years.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I agree.”
We ate in silence for a while. “My grandmother loved to garden,” he said. “Every summer she filled these big planters and hanging baskets on her porch with petunias.”
I held my breath.
“She had huge, cascading mounds of them. Every summer. I don’t know how she did it.”
“Probably Miracle-Gro,” I said.
He looked hurt, so I added, “Or maybe she had a way with them.”
“I love petunias. I thought they might work in the pots around the promenade. What do you think?”
I almost told him what it was like to spend an afternoon planting petunias, but stopped myself.
“It’s nice you have a happy memory of your grandmother,” I said.
When we were finished eating, I showed Leo some of the other campus gardens. At the crescent rose bed, I stopped to smell a floribunda rose. Leo waited, then leaned over to smell the exact same flower, as if, despite all the blooms around us, I had found the best one.
Travel Supplies
Route 23 is like a lot of roads leading into towns that tightly zone their historical cores. It’s the spare room of the house, the place where you put everything you use only once in a while but aren’t willing to give up entirely. It’s where you keep your car dealerships, your fast-food joints, your Costcos and Sam’s Clubs. Usually there’s no pedestrian life at all, it’s just a chute for cars running errands.
That’s what I was doing when I stopped by the CVS before heading to the train station on my way to New York to visit Vanessa. I was trying to hurry, but a woman started talking to me near the travel-size products.
“I used this brand once,” she said. “I liked it.”
She wasn’t exactly talking to me, but she wasn’t not talking to me either. When you suspect a stranger wants your attention, anyone’s attention—just a moment of the universe’s time—but you avoid eye contact or keep walking, is that being a good neighbor? I wonder what they’d say on the message board.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she muttered. “How many ounces are allowed? And is it per bottle or combined?” She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the little bottle she was holding. But there was no one else around.
I picked out a tiny shampoo and looked at the floor. “Per bottle,” I said. “Each bottle can’t have more than three ounces.”
“Is that right? Thank you. I haven’t flown in so long and I know there are all these new rules.”
I smiled, sort of.
“I’m really nervous, to be honest.”
I believed her.
“Thank you so much. I really don’t want to go through one of those full-body scanners. My friend says they’re not safe and I had a mastectomy last year. She says you can get in a line for the other kind of scanner. Is that right?”
“I think so.”
“Do you travel a lot?”
“Not really. Well . . . recently I have been. I’m leaving on a trip tonight, but by train, not airplane.” It’s possible this was the most information I’d ever voluntarily given to a stranger.
“For work? What do you do?”
“I’m a botanist.”
“Oh, so plants and flowers?”
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting.”
Nevertheless, she had nothing else to say about it. She raised her little shampoo in a kind of salute.
I raised my bottle in return and we parted.
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At the checkout there were a lot of registers but only one with an employee behind it. The line was long and forced through an aisle made of candy. I placed myself squarely behind a mother using too many words to encourage her young son to make better choices about what he ate. She in turn was behind a mother with two older children busy on their devices. When the first boy crowded the other two, his mother said, “Make sure to leave room for your friends.”
I thought for a moment they all knew one another, then realized she was using “friends” to mean people in your way whom you don’t know. The three children eyed one another.
* * *
—
MY TRAIN WAS NOT UNTIL SEVEN, but I got there early because there’s a bar I like in the station. It has a white linoleum floor, shares space with a Chinese buffet, and is perennially decorated for Mardi Gras. I don’t know why. What I do know is that a small chicken fried rice goes surprisingly well with a glass of cold white wine.
I opened my purse to pay the bill and found a tree sheet.
American Elm (Ulmus americana)
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American elm was a common street and park tree because of its rapid growth, tolerance of urban conditions, and broad umbrella crown. But overplanting of the species, especially in residential areas where the high, graceful archway over the street was prized, led to an unhealthy monoculture that left the species open to pests and disease.
My parents lost an elm in our backyard to Dutch elm disease when I was young and my father had followed the development of new disease-resistant cultivars ever since. There was one, the Valley Forge elm, that seemed to be doing well in trials. That’s probably what he had in mind.
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