The Trees on Our Streets--and in Our Minds

Joyce just finished reading Richard Powers' novel The Overstory, a powerfully wonderful novel about people and trees and "civilization." You can't really read that book without thinking of the trees on your street, in your neighborhood, etc.

We have all sorts of trees around us--from weeping cherries to evergreens, to magnolias, to oaks and maples. And many more.

Our bedroom is upstairs in the front of the house, facing the street, so I can lie in bed and, employing the streetlights, watch the seasons slowly advance as I lie there.

I like all the seasons (from the comfort of our home--if not outside). I watch the leaves slowly appear, flourish, change color, fall to the ground. And for much of the year, of course, the branches are bare.

Doesn't matter. My mind plays games with the configuration of nothingness. I see shapes where there are none, really—nothing but branches and, sometimes, leaves. For several years I've been able to see a capital A, reminding me of The Scarlet Letter and poor Hester Prynne. I think the A I see looks exactly like the one on the cover of the paperback copy I taught in English III for ten years at Western Reserve Academy.

A few years ago, I was positive I saw--when the trees were leaved--my own face, beard and all. (And, thankfully, not white.)

Last year, among the bare branches, I saw the face of Davy Crockett, coonskin cap and all.

We humans are programmed to see faces and pictures in the trees, especially faces--a survival adaptation, I believe.* Any splash on any wall or window can evoke anyone from Shakespeare to Han Solo to Bilbo Baggins. Any cloud can show us a cat, a dog, a shark, Wonder Woman.

It amuses me to think that some playful dryad arranges things just for me, to entertain me a little before she hands me over to Morpheus.

But, of course, it’s my own playful mind creating images where there are none.

A few years ago I was reading the complete poems of A. E. Housman, a poet I’d really come to admire. Back in Hiram High School, senior year, our teacher had asked us to memorize Housman’s “When I Was One and Twenty” (link to poem). I didn’t do too well, but, subsequently, I’ve memorized it—got it down cold.

Anyway, when I came across “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now” in the Housman volume, I knew I had to memorize it, as well.

And so I did.

And it, like Powers’ novel, continues ruffling in my mind, ruffling like, well, like leaves in a breeze.

*Some people have the inability to recognize faces, a condition called prosopagnosia. Link to info about it.

** A Shropshire Lad  2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

BY A. E. HOUSMAN (1859-1936)

 Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

 

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

 

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.