;)
Friday Night Rehearsal Dinner
There’s always a line of tall trees, arrayed in the middle distance, sometimes farther. You can see light between the trees, and there always seems to be one larger gap, where the row divides in effect into two and through the gap you see more of the sky, which is more or less a uniform field, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, but most often a bright indistinguishable haze. And this row of trees could be anywhere, it could be outside a high school football field, across the practice field at the edges of a subdivision. It could be at the margins of an industrial park that sits on a flat ridge edged by inadvertently leftover vegetation, including these trees. That in fact is where the row presents itself tonight, in front of a sunset so extinguished there’s hardly any telling west from east. Outside a fish restaurant in Hanover, Maryland, hard by I-95. Such trees remind me, every time, of lonely rows of tall pines along the marshes just behind the shore of the Chesapeake. I guess that’s where we first met. Those pines are the original. They seem to replicate themselves everywhere. It would be tempting to consider them witnesses. However, I believe they are to be witnessed – witnessed as they watch us, and wonder what we do.
Saturday, September 25, 2010 at 10:43AM
Reader Comments (4)
I find this post uncomfortable, as Bob and I have just decided to eradicate 18 trees from our property -- mostly huge pines, none charming, but all living and harboring life. And then we'll put up a fence instead. Bizarre behavior.
Well, in the houses Laura and I have looked at, there have been quite a few where I knew we’d have to take down a tree or two ... or three. Maybe we can write something nice about fences, although ... it’s been done ...
I forgot to say, it became impossible to be a purist on this subject as soon as people started clearing out a space for campfires. And it isn’t just the live trees: I’ve cut down some very dead trees for firewood only to see mice leaping out of their apartments as the building crashes to the ground.
There is such a tree row as I am driving north on Ridge Road to Damascus. looking left toward Sugarloaf Mountain. Seemingly midway between me and the mountain was a tall, ancient, gently rounded line of trees; now a new road makes a sharp cut 5o yards wide in that line; breaks its middle and breaks my heart every single time I see it.