JOY ALONG THE WAY: TREES I HAVE KNOWN

So beautifully have poets and other writers described trees, and so indelibly have such descriptions been stamped on my mind that sometimes they seem to merge with reality. Haven't I, somewhere, sometime, heard Longfellow's murmuring pines and hemlocks? Stood under the spreading chestnut tree that shaded the village smithy's stand? Seen Kilmer's generic tree that wore bird nests in its hair?

Some of the eloquent descriptions of real trees read like fairy tales. For instance, Africa's baobab tree grows so big around (30 feet) that natives can chop out a room-size living quarter in the trunk and live inside the tree.

I'll probably never see a real baobab tree. But I can sit, imaginatively, in such a tree room and think, fondly, of real trees I have seen.

There was the cedar seedling beside the pathway Lou and I traveled to grade school. We were very protective of that little tree, planning to groom it for some future Christmas tree. When it was of suitable size we couldn't bear to have it cut down and every Christmas time, before our route to school was changed, we took a cookie or some bit of food from our lunch boxes to hang on the tree for a bird's feast.

Then there were the two sour gum trees across the wide meadow, up against the foothill of Sims Mountain. In autumn they flared up like gargantuan red-hot exclamation marks. "They mark a corner of our property," Grandpa told us, over and over. They seemed such suitable markers, declaring that within the boundaries, happy people lived.

When the present city in which I live was smaller and I was younger, I knew a lot of its trees. I often declared the huge, perfectly symmetrical evergreen in Rigdon's yard on West Broadway to be the most beautiful tree in town. It's gone now. Then there was, and still is, the linden tree in Cargle's West Broadway yard. Red Weiser, on Cape Rock Drive, had a gorgeous sassafras tree, unlike any sassafras I'd ever seen before or since. Tall and big around it was. In fall its foliage was almost as red as the sour gum. It, too, is gone.

The trees in old Lorimier cemetery give me "another world" feeling as I walk amongst them. Silvery gray bark. Huge boles. Silent. One touches them hesitantly.

When Arena Park was formed and the center was erected, some smart person discovered the old, old post oak on the south side and saw to it that it was spared. It stands today with a proud marker that declares it to be a Centennial Tree.

For 30 years, a favorite tree of mine has been the huge sycamore on the east side of the park, nearby three cypress trees. On my daily walks, I would sit on the ground beneath the tree to rest a while, or if in a hurry, just press my palm against its bark, as if to say, "Hello, old friend." But, alas, this season, for some reason unknown to me, the sycamore is dying. It is hard for me to watch its slow goodbye.

"But, a tree for a tree," I whisper to myself as I go out to water the new little Bradford pear in the back yard. It will blossom pretty, maybe have a bird's nest in its hair. Too, it will save me from strange looks and head tapping intimations should I have put a sycamore there.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.