Postcard From Hardwick: Tell Me About Your Beloved… Trees
When I was five, my family lived in a tract house in Boulder, Colorado. We had moved from an A-frame in the outer edges of Santa Fe County, New Mexico, where the deck had a stunning view of the wild mountains. While my parents were likely hemmed in by the grid of paved streets, as a young child I was enraptured to live in a neighborhood. Kids next door! We could walk to a playground! A few houses down, we snuck into a bedroom of my friend and laid our hands on a waterbed, marveling.
Across the street was even more amazing wonder. A magnificent tree, its wide trunk branched into a wide Y, dominated a front yard. Perhaps recognizing this singular joy, the older couple who lived in that house allowed the neighborhood children to climb their tree. No need to ask permission. This was the 1970s when families and homeowners’ insurance companies never fretted about potential lawsuits.
Even now — having climbed many trees in my life — I remember the solidity of that great tree and laying as a small girl cradled in its branches.
In Hardwick, where I now live, the town boasts its beauty spots — the craggy, wooded knob of Buffalo Mountain, the myriad brooks and streams rushing along to the Lamoille River. But the true beauty mark of Hardwick is its immense silver maples: five along Route 15 near the fire department’s paved lot, one near the giant Yellow Barn, a few more interspersed in neighborhoods. Walk around a bend and suddenly a maple spreads into the sky, breath-catching.
Stick-season November is the brief slip of time when the leaves have shed, the forest undergrowth has bent down, and the snow not yet commenced its winter’s work of laying radiant white layers.
These trees grew from slender seedlings from a time long ago when none of us were alive. Now, they stitch together the sky and the stony earth, illustrating that twig and branch, bark and cambium, root and root hair, create a mighty, living being.
As the foliage’s flames dull and quench, these great, silent trees remind me that beauty is unbidden in this world, often unnoted and unremarked. Walk around that bend in the road, and there’s no need to own that patch of land or pay property taxes on any lot. It’s simply the tree and me: breathing in, breathing out, my fingertips brushing rough bark.
And you? Your trees?
