My Life Among the Trees

I'm no nature boy, but I loves me a nice dogwood

First things first: Thank you all so much for reading and/or supporting Everything Is Broken. It means so much to me to know that you are opening and reading this weekly missive.

I will be on vacation for the next few weeks, so Everything Is Broken will pause until early June. It is possible that I may be inspired to send you a letter or postcard from vacationland – possible, but not likely – so I’ll “see you” back here in a few weeks.

---

I am looking at the dogwood tree we planted in our postage-stamp front yard a couple of years ago. This spring it has bloomed for the first time, with dense foliage and lovely pink flowers. The other day my next-door neighbor sent me a text message noting how beautiful the tree looks right now.

When we first got the tree, it was rather spindly, all skeletal, vertical thin branches. The first year, there was just a trace of foliage on the tree, and it did not seem to be growing much, if at all. It seemed stuck in the shape it came wrapped in from the tree farm. It showed no hint of flowering, and, while I knew that it would take time for the tree to root fully in its new home before it could show any signs of growth, I was a bit worried that the tree was a dud. That happens. But patience has been rewarded with this spectacular transformation of what was a Charlie Brown-like stick-tree into a lush, vibrant ornament, the crown and focal point of our tiny, rurban “front yard.”

For much of my adult life, I have not paid very much attention to trees, plants, and flowers. I appreciated some big old trees that provided shade, but I did not have a real relationship with the trees, nor with whatever plantings existed or were placed in the beds at the various houses where I have lived. Gardens I visited that were over-manicured in the English style seemed artificial and fussy and belied the very term “nature” – there was nothing natural about them. They betrayed the planning and labor of the professionals who designed and tended the gardens. Mind you, there is nothing inherently wrong about this (at least as far as I know, which is not a whole hell of a lot), but they just failed to move me.

But when it came time to do a little planning of our own to fix up our little patch of dirt – with its vestiges of gardens past, woodlands going further back, maybe even meadow at some point – I instinctively knew what I wanted as a small statement in front of our house: a dogwood tree that would flower pink.

Why? Because we had one of those in front of the house in which I grew up. And while I found almost everything about that house and that suburb and the life that went on in and outside of it to be greatly embarrassing before I even left home for college (in the Berkshires, mind you), I did retain some kind of sentimental attachment to the dogwood tree. I remember how I loved that tree as a youth, how happy the annual blooming made me (in a childhood where not much made me happy), how I even sang to that tree as if I were in an old-time Hollywood musical. I don’t think I even remembered all of this when I was advocating for the dogwood; the feeling I had about it was more vague, a tug or a pull of sorts, but nothing more than that. Just enough to make me say, yeah, we had a pink dogwood where I grew up, I liked it, let’s get one, I bet it would look perfect out front.

The appearance of the new dogwood in all its splendid glory has opened up a floodgate of these memories, not only of my childhood dogwood but of my connection to all the trees on our little patch of suburbia. I don’t know when the street where I lived was developed. We moved there in 1963, and all the houses and yards seemed well lived in, but this street of houses must have been of relatively recent vintage -- a postwar phenomenon. There were streets in the greater neighborhood that clearly preceded the postwar housing boom – the houses and yards were smaller and darker (they were more densely populated with trees). Of the blocks that were adjacent to ours, one was constructed at the same time as ours, while the other one was one of the older types.

Presumably the land on which our houses were built was densely wooded until the cranes came in and leveled most of the trees – most, but not all. Each house had one or two old trees in the front yard and between two and a handful of trees in the backyard. Now that I have dug deep in my memory of the trees at the house where I lived, I can pretty much recall all of them. Out front, adjacent to our driveway, was a grand old maple tree (at least I think it was a maple, maybe it was an oak, I’m a rock critic, not an arboriculturist) that in the fall shed big hand-sized leaves easy to rake into large leaf piles perfectly suited for jumping into.

When we first moved into the house, there was a mammoth willow tree – the only one of its kind on our street – at the curbside of the front yard, near the corner of our next-door neighbor’s yard. Within a few years, however, my father had the tree removed. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe it was thought to be a nuisance, or dangerous, with its floppy limbs hanging down and over the street. It was unique and wistful and rich with character, and I remember being hugely disappointed – sad, even -- that it had to go.

There were several trees in our backyard, big ones, too -- not quite as big as that maple/oak in the front yard, but pretty impressive. For some reason I think they were hickory trees, their long straight trunks bare of limbs until one looked well up into the tree halfway up. I seem to recall they shed walnut-like nuts – hickory nuts? Then, on one side of our backyard property line, there was a low-hanging tree with several trunks growing in all different directions and with low-hanging branches that made the tree seem more horizontal than vertical. It was perfect (and easy) for climbing and sitting in, for idling away the hours in communion with nature like in some Buddhist or Hasidic tale. Looking back now, I suppose I was forest-bathing, but of course I had no idea that was what I was doing at the time, nor that I was imprinting a valuable connection between myself and trees, and maybe even nature, albeit a strange, suburban nature sculpted beyond recognition by human beings.

I don’t think of myself as being particularly connected to nature. I enjoy a walk along a country trail or on a forest path as much as anyone, but indoors is definitely my default. I am most at home at home, indoors, reading a book in a cozy chair or lying down on a comfy sofa (or, even better, in bed during the day). Call me Oblomov. (You wouldn’t be the first to do so.) In spite of having lived the vast majority of my life in “the country,” if that’s what we call the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, preceded by those annoying fifteen years in that yene velt called suburbia, the city has the strongest pull on me. It’s an ancestral thing: I was born in Queens, N.Y., almost my entire extended family lived in (and still lives in) New York City, and three of my four immigrant grandparents lived in cities (Odessa, Zhitomir, Czestochowa) before fleeing pogromville. (My beloved maternal grandfather was the only one who grew up in a real shtetl, which from what I understand was more of a shtetele – a small shtetl, perhaps a village – than a proper market town.)

What all this means is that (with the exception of a few, short stints residing in Manhattan and a half-year living in Jerusalem) I have lived my entire life like a fish out of water. I’ve been planted in all the wrong places. I have suffered my share of alienation and cognitive dissonance as a result. Hudson, N.Y., where I have lived for the past dozen years or so, is technically a city, and operates like one. And it has that “urban vibe” that attracts visitors and newcomers who like the city but want more access, dare I say it, to nature, as well as to a more laid-back way of living. Hudson connects me a bit to the urbanite dwelling inside of me – plus I can walk from my house to a train that lands me in midtown Manhattan in about two hours, not unlike a long subway ride to an outer borough.

And then I am always happy to come home to Hudson, to sing to my dogwood tree and to run around my backyard with my dog – a Brooklyn shorthair, of course.

Roll Call: Founding Members

Anne Fredericks
Anonymous (6)
Erik Bruun
Benno Friedman
Richard Koplin
Steve and Helice Picheny
Rhonda Rosenheck
Elisa Spungen and Rob Bildner/Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook
Mary Herr Tally