It's Official - I'm a Tree Hugger

I think it started in kindergarten when some nasty little boy spilled ink all over my beautiful coloring of the mimeographed tree outline that represented spring in our, anything but artistic , art period at St. Pats. God forbid we should ever go outside the lines. I cried when my masterpiece was rendered too messy to tape up on the board.


Later in grammar school our back door neighbor cut the limb off a giant oak. It was the limb that had protruded over the fence into our immense back yard. My dad had put up a tire swing on a rope for us and the whole neighborhood loved it. The house behind us changed hands and the new owner was child-noise averse - so he did the logical thing - he cut off the 20 foot limb. I cried when I came home from school to find it, and the tire swing, on the ground behind our playhouse. Daddy built us a new swing set from pipes and other construction site materials, but it was never the same.


Late in grammar school Lyn, Pat, Dee and I would write the names of our true loves on pieces of paper, secure them in a taped up Band Aid box and hide them in the trunk of a tree on the banks of the Passaic River. That's also where we rubbed ourselves with poison ivy leaves to prove we were immune from the actual poison. - That's a story for another time. Many years later, I went over to the river to look for the tree and the Band Aid box. I searched in vain - as the memory of exactly where the tree was, eluded me. I envision some child in 2052 stumbling upon a hundred year old secret of our true loves - while seeking refuge in the branches of an oak tree by the river.


While I was in high school, they started clearing the vacant land adjoining our house to make way for six new houses. Every tree they took down struck a blow to my heart. The neighbor kids - the Parkers, Bystraks and Downey' and the Siergiej girls spent a lot of time in trees and under trees for some reason. I'm sure Freud or Dr. Phil or Craig Ferguson would have some explanation for that. We eventually came to welcome the Rileys and later the Stracks, although we never quite forgave them for taking the place of our trees. The ones they planted in their yards are majestic today and all is well with the world.


I don't have any tragic tree tale from college, although trees played an important part in our lives. The University of Arizona is an oasis in the desert and boasts a wide range of trees. - from the palm trees where we posed as freshman cheerleaders, to the olive trees that lined the streets of the north campus and spewed their fruit all squishy and oily on the lawns, to the wonderful fragrance of the orange blossoms on the trees outside our windows at Yuma Hall . We took those trees for granted, but in retrospect they enriched our lives and our college experience with such subtlety that we never even noticed.



When Joe and I lived in Polo Village in the Quonset hut our only shade was the mulberry tree that towered over our little home. Every year it laid a carpet of messy, pinkish-purple fruit that stained our shoes and our sidewalk and made the birds drunk with their fermented juice. The folks in charge offered to cut the tree down, but we declined their offer. It was, after all, our only shade and a living thing.



Back in Chatham in the late 60s we planted a small willow tree in our back yard. It grew in beauty and gave our kids shade in the summer. We were warned that the roots would probably cause problems with the sewer systems and water pipes - and those warnings must have come to fruition, for, when I returned for a visit in the late 70s it was gone. Glad I wasn't there when it happened.


In River Forest, whose elm lined streets were canopied with green glory in the summer, we survived several tree incidents. Dutch Elm Disease struck with a fury and we lost three huge trees from our property and along the parkway. To add insult to injury our next door neighbor cut down a healthy apple tree because "the damn apples attract bees". He also cut down a beautiful Norwegian Pine because he didn't like the shape of it. The trees we planted to replace the elms are now thriving and enhancing that little corner of the village. I never forgave the neighbor.



When I arrived here in Tucson a few weeks ago, I knew our community was undergoing a tree trimming project to clear out the mistletoe and get rid of dead branches in the mesquite trees. What I didn't know, was that our board of directors had authorized the removal of two stately palms (shown at left) and another shade tree next to our small swimming pool -which is my refuge when I am here. When I first approached the pool that first day, I felt a surge in my chest, a stab in my stomach, and such a feeling of loss that I cried on and off for days. It is just now that I can talk about it without a rise in blood pressure and heart beat. I will deal with the board of directors in my own way, when I am calm enough to do it professionally. In the meantime I am still grieving. Even if they planted new ones today, I am unlikely to live long enough to enjoy their beauty, their shade and the sound of them swaying in the wind. It took mother nature 40 years to create those trees and a group of fools, less than an hour to destroy them.




If this makes me a tree-hugger, so be it. There it is - I'm out of the closet on this issue. Here is the after picture.