The Tales Tree Trunks Tell
Each time I stroll down Long Hill Road past our New Hampshire home of years gone by, something new reveals itself — usually something about trees.
Long Hill Road, its borders marked by large old trees, was once the route of stagecoaches that rolled past village farms. Part of what is intriguing about these trees is their size. For a person from the wilds of Upper Michigan, where most of the trees have grown since a second or third cutting, the New Hampshire trees are uncommonly large.
As I tread the lonesome road and its winding offshoots, my attention is drawn to the variety of tree trunks. Some are stately and straight but the more interesting ones are twisted, lumpy, and gnarled. They reveal marks of events no longer traceable. For the most part, I am entranced more by the dead and dying trees than by the living ones. Under their spell, I have taken pictures of the more unusual ones.
The appeal of these old trees is in their ugliness. The more twisted and grotesque their shape, the more interesting their appearance. Is there not a similar pattern among humans? Some dashingly handsome types may put too much stock in outward appearance and neglect to develop inner qualities, while less-attractive humans frequently develop interesting personalities. Like gnarled trees, weathered people tend to invite glances.
Trees bear the marks of their experience. A limb cut off, a collision with a blunt or sharp object, and infestations of insects all leave their mark. So with us. The marks of our encounters with life, of our experiences, are sometimes physical and sometimes deep emotional scars within.
I am intrigued by a tree's endless usefulness. In its early years a tree may have been used to set a boundary, to provide shade, bear fruit, or add beauty and contrast. Through its more mature yam, a tree may have been used to support a child's swing, a utility wire, a fence, or to provide firewood — whatever imagination and utility allow. And, in its dying days a tree's diminishing trunk nourishes the ground around it. It is not unusual to find a short, sawed-off stump sprouting a new little pine tree.
Some people fantasize about being endlessly useful. For many of us our usefulness may be more a matter of attitude than of capacity. A tree's generosity goes from one generation to another. Take for example fruit trees, once integral to bustling farms, that are now abandoned, gnarled trunks. They still blossom in spring and they continue to bear fruit, though it is usually inedible. In times when they were better attended, their fruit was plucked each fall and each spring they would come right back to produce more. We can learn from the generosity of trees.
Lonely, tired tree trunks, that guard decades, generations, and even centuries of events long forgotten, can tell us tales and can be a source of fruitful observations if we do not pass by too quickly.