The road between Marcellus and Camillus is ablaze with autumn color. You can’t help but be captivated by the sheer magnificence of the trees as they say goodbye to summer in a blaze of glory. Silhouetted against the arch of the railroad tunnel or the evergreens, they shout a halleluiah to all they have done, all they have accomplished this year.
“What?” you say? “Trees? Accomplishment?”
Let me explain The deciduous trees of the temperate zone have added another growth ring, translating the sugars produced in spring and summer, into proteins out of which their yearly growth comes. From this comes the wood with which we have built our homes and warmed our bodies. Not the least accomplishment is the production of Oxygen. Trees, their leaves reaching up to the light, through the magic of photosynthesis, transform Carbon dioxide and water into sugars and, essential to life on earth, Oxygen. The trees clean the environment of our effluent CO2 and give us back, life giving Oxygen.
I remember being an adolescent with a sketch book, drawing the trees in the woods that climbed up the hill behind our house. Maples, black cherries, chestnut oaks and birches, so many birches, like a corps de ballet spread over the hillside … dancers, their limbs raised to the heavens in praise of the sun from which they created life. Interspersed between the pictures of trees, my youthful enthusiasm added snippets from the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. What can I say? I was an adolescent girl, in love with the romance of Browning’s words and the beauty of trees … or was it the beauty of Browning and the romance of trees. I do get the two mixed up.
There is a song of life hidden in the truth of trees, one that sang to me then as the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems. There among the trees, I wrote in my young round hand, “How do I love thee..” Both the sketches and the poems, outward evidence of the fierce grasp I had on what I believed to be beautiful, valuable and the need that I had to be a part of that loveliness. Did I capture it in the drawings? In the copying of the poetry? In some ways, the answer is “yes”, for even know, decades and decades later, I still remember the feelings that compelled me to draw, to appreciate the emotion of the poetry.
I remember the trees on First Street in Marcellus. The lovely arching, ancient trees that impressed me as a young teacher on her first day at work are, for the most part, gone. The trees are gone, some having stood there for a hundred years or more, far longer than any village residents have been alive. There are no replacements to replicate their majesty, their circumference, born of years and years of summers, their generous branches, the thousands of leaves that quietly cleaned and refreshed the air. All that remains is the bare facts of their loss and memories such as mine.
Those ancients have been replaced by trees that will never reach the heights and widths of those that were removed. They won’t crack sidewalks or send invading roots into sewer lines. Their branches won’t entangle the power lines. Their more modest size will generate less leaf cover and thus less work in the fall. They won’t attain the breadth behind which a child can hide and won’t replicate the green tunnel of branches and stately trunks that gave First Street its signature beauty.
Still they are trees, more diminutive, but trees. Perhaps some youngster, impressed with their beauty will need to capture their essence in a sketch book. She might even discover Elizabeth Barrett Browning and add the lines from one of her poems:
How there you sat in summer-time,
May yet be in your mind;
And how you heard the green woods sing
Beneath the freshening wind.
For every breath that stirs the trees,
Doth cause a leaf to fall.
I hope that there are such children, who find beauty in words and nature to carry on the sentiment that sustains the threads of meaning beyond that which is expedient.
