Trees

When you grow up in rural Mississippi on a dirt farm you are surrounded by woods and trees...They are just part of the landscape.  You never think twice about them.  You just take them for granted.  Woods are wonderful things to wander in, to dream in, to explore for hidden bounty like wild grapes and hickory nuts, and whatever else may grow there.  Such was my childhood.  I loved the woods and spent countless hours exploring and dreaming in them.
I remember reading Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees" in school and even memorizing most of it..."I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree"....and so it goes.  When I read Betty Smith's novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" it dawned on me that all children don't have an abundance of trees in their lives.  The story is about the two Nolan children who grow up in a tenement house in Brooklyn, New York, and the delight they find in a single tree that grew in their tenement courtyard.  They were so awed by it they even wanted to name it.  It was then that I really came to appreciate the fact we had trees and woods around our house.
The neighbors that lived just up the road from us had planted a grove of pine trees between our house and theirs and we called it the pine thicket.  We had worn a path through it to our aunt's house on the next road from ours.  When our old black and white television would burn out and Mama would wait six months of so to have it repaired we usually went to her house to watch TV...if we stayed late at night we had two choices.  Take the main gravel road home which was safer or take the short cut through the pine thicket, which was dark and spooky at night.  Depending on how dark it might be that night we would usually choose the short cut.  We knew it by heart and it was the fifties.  A safer and gentler time.  Didn't mean we weren't afraid of spooky places, but still, it was a shorter and faster way to go.  If we set out running we could clear the piney woods in lickedy split, so most of the time that is what we did.
I realize now that I must have inherited my love of trees from my grandfather on my mother's side.  I remember two very distinct trees that grew on my Grandfather's place.  One was a giant mulberry tree that stood at the back of the house and which I loved to climb.  It never failed to have long, wonderful tasting mulberries and we loved to go up in the tree and pick them.  They were purple and messy and my mother told me one time that my Grandmother hated that tree because of the mess it caused in the yard, but Grandpa had ordered it and set it out there and so it stood..It was a delightful tree, not just because it produced fruit we kids liked but because it provided such a neat place to climb and play and the shade it gave that part of the yard...
The other trees I remember were catalpa trees...Grandpa had ordered them too.  They did not grow wild around there.  He had them because he had ordered them and set them out.  If I remember right Mama told me Grandpa ordered the catalpa tree at the same time he ordered the mulberry....and they multiplied..  They had gorgeous white blooms in the summer and then long brown catalpa beans where the flowers had been.  Worms really liked these trees.  The catalpa worms were long and green and existed aplenty on the branches.  I remember one conversation where the adults were discussing what to do with the worms and someone in the group made the comment they made excellent fishing worms. On the interstate highway between Nashville Tennessee and Chattanooga, Tennessee in the late spring, early summer, the woods are alive with beautiful purple blossoms that look very much like wisteria but these flowers grow on trees, not vines, and have no relationship to wisteria.  They are purple catalpa trees blooms.  Grandpa would have loved them....

Grandpa and Grandma's old house is long since gone and I imagine so it the giant mulberry tree.  I wonder if there are any of the catalpa trees left there, too...The landscape has changed so much that now the only place those trees exist are in my memory...the same is true of the pine thicket.  It has long since been cut and turned into pulpwood...but in my mind they still grow just like they did in my childhood.  And all because an old man called Grandpa loved them too and planted them there.

Ethyl Remembers the Tarzan Swing.

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When I woke up this morning I found I was lost in a childhood memory. There were several acres of woods behind our house and, as a child, I used to wander endlessly in those woods. A spring flowed out from the roots of a giant oak tree, and from that water source came a little creek. Not really big enough to play in, but just enough water to flow through the woods and water some trees and make a lovely little glen in which the banks were covered with the lushest, softest, greenest moss. Shady and cool, and the perfect place to spend a hot Mississippi summer afternoon lying on the bank and getting totally lost in a good book. Shaded glens have always been a love of mine and if you throw in some cool moss, it's even better.
Those woods were the source of many a long afternoon of delightful fun, not the least of which was our own homemade 'Tarzan' swing. It consisted of a single piece of sea-grass rope tied on the outstretched limb of an ancient dogwood tree. The tree was an oddity itself as it grew uphill. By that I mean the root source was near the bottom of a big hill and the tree had grown in the same direction as the hill itself. Not straight and tall like the trees around it but straight up the hill, so that at the top, it leaned in the same direction as the hill itself. Out from that old gnarled tree grew a single sturdy limb and on that limb my brothers had tied the old rope about midway out. How they managed to get that far out without breaking their necks never really occurred to me. The rope hung down to arm's length and at the end, they had tied a single stick, so that you could hold each end of it in your hands. If you grasped the cross stick with your hands and climbed to the top of the hill then let go, you literally went flying. You had to hold your feet up on top of the hill but once in midair, you stretched them out for the ride down the hillside. Out over the creek and through the air you flew. Just like Tarzan! Swinging on the wild grapevine. Except ours wasn't a vine. It was a seagrass rope....but oh, you could imagine. Imagine you were in the wilds of the jungle. At any moment you might hear the sound of a mighty elephant or the roar of a hungry lion. Such fun was never had by kids in a city park swinging on a swing with a bottom in it. Oh no! Ours was the real thing. In the middle of the woods. Over the creek. Down the hillside. How many times we flew down that hill as kids I will never know. What I do know is that it was almost a daily occurrence during the summer. We would sometimes take other kids to our secret swing, deep in our private jungle, and show them our own personal wonder. And they never failed to be impressed. After watching so many Saturday afternoon jungle movies with the real Tarzan our little piece of rope hung high on a tree was the nearest thing to the real thing they would ever encounter......
Once after I married I walked back down our little path through the woods just to see if our swing was still there. The path had almost grown up with underbrush since our anxious little bare feet had stopped tearing down it to our secret place.
What I found was the tattered remains of the rope, the bottom half had completely gone. The stick at the end had long since rotted and the top half of the rope was all that remained. It was frayed and tattered, the weather had done it's job of sending our beloved swing back to the earth. All that remained was the memory. Memory of long hot summer afternoons spent deep in the Mississippi woods, swinging high above the ground, out over the little creek, and back up the hill. Again and again. What we didn't realize then as children was the fact we would never again be this free. Free to hold our feet up and go flying through the air on our Tarzan swing.