The trees on the side of our property seeded themselves. I didn’t plant them when I moved in with my daughter. It was an empty slope with a view of the river and Campbell’s Ledge.

I had to install a fence to protect my young daughter in the yard. I found a used wrought iron fence with a gate. It was painted Tiffany blue, and I scraped it all off. No sandblaster; that would have been nice. Nope, just me a wire brush and a scraper. It took a while to finish that project. But I did. Then my father told me I needed to prime it, and I did – with primer paint and a paintbrush. I did. Then I painted it black with a paintbrush. The much brighter thing to have done was to get a tarp and spray-paint the fence pieces on it.

The trees grew and provided excellent privacy but got so high we lost our view. We cut them to a reasonable height to still get privacy but not so high that we can’t see the bridge and river. They grew back! They didn’t want to be smaller. They wanted to keep growing. And the circumstances don’t matter. They grow on a slope in mostly ash-filled dirt from the previous homeowner’s expended coal after it was burned. The soil was almost crispy from the charred coal biscuits. I shoveled by shovel-full, trying to level the yard, taking it from one side and putting it to the other.

But those trees, “swamp maple,” as my dear neighbor (god rest his soul) had told me they were, won’t be prevented from growing. Those tree seeds, or “helicopters” as we called them as children, seeded themselves on the side of the property. One tree on the property held up the clothesline the previous owners put up. It was nice to air dry the clothes until the trees grew, spewing stuff on the line and making it dirty. Then I’d clean it, and it would happen again. Plus, the spiders love the line in the warmer months, and I will not use a line that houses any spec of a spider! I can’t stand them!

My point of this post is that we are part of an earth system that grows things without human intervention. They will continue to seed themselves, growing more and more trees until the sunlight isn’t sufficient, and “they grab up all the light,” as in the Rush song, The Trees.

We can’t stop mother nature. She will continue to grow and grow and grow until there’s no place left hospitable for her to grow. But here’s the thing, all this green around us helps us to breathe, helps us be here. And we’re connected to this earth – its energy, ergo we’re connected to the trees. We need to do a better job of protecting them.

This was a weird blog for me. I had a good idea, but I am unsure if I shared it adequately. But we’re intelligent people. I think the message came across – love Mother Earth.
Thank you for reading this.

To the air,
Francesca

 

 

To the air,

Francesca