It is a lazy late-summer Sunday afternoon as I write this; it is also my birthday, and as I sit at my desk today and watch through my window as warm breezes sift through maple leaves, memories of trees other than those in my front yard come back to me, and I open them like brand new gifts.
Our house is a quiet one for now; my son, restless as ever, is on the road. My daughter, visiting for the day, naps on a couch. My wife is stretched out in a chair getting well-deserved down time away from cooking and schedules; she yawns and stretches like a house cat. I hear only a fan as it hums in a corner.
We all have been hard-pressed to speak in these past few hours and break the cool quietness of our house that we feel we have earned by a
week of work.
My memories of trees are not serious or painful or tiring things, but rather are the comfortable kind, old-shoe reminiscences that take me home, when my parents were younger than my age, and the thought of having “nothing to do” made me itch to move much more than I want to scratch now.
I lived in a place where fat, tall red oaks and big smooth beeches stood. Those trees are, for the most part, gone now. A few were cut, a few more blown down by big winds, and some simply grew old and gave up their relentless push upward. I loved living where I did, and I spent much of my time under and around and in our trees.
I have never envied children today when I see them punching at phones and racing through digitalized streets with a plastic controller in their hands; I had a bigger world to conquer on foot.
One of my favorite trees stood over a sandy hillside behind our house. It was a huge, kindly oak, and no matter where the sun stood, those who played under the tree were shaded by it; it was that big. There wasn’t a single branch within ladder length on that tree, and it was as if the whole hillside I played on was anchored there by it alone.
Another tree I befriended was a relatively young beech that sat just to the west of our house along the winding drive that formed a horseshoe around our place. With their thin, gray skins, beech trees beg for names to be carved in them, and I did just that with a pocket knife that my grandfather gave to me when I was just young enough to want one but not yet careful enough to avoid the occasional accident.
Beeches and their copper-toothed leaves dotted the landscape around our homestead. A massive one stood on the hill across from our house on my aunt and uncle’s property; I played there for hours, both alone and with my cousins and my sister. Our field guide to trees says that beeches usually grow to no more than 80 feet, but this old beauty was taller than that for sure, as was yet another that grew along my grandparents’ driveway; they lived 200 yards away from us, at most.
I remember when my grandfather and my dad hired a man – his name was Jim Blackburn – to come to our house. Jim could have been a gymnast; he was strong and nimble and not very big. He climbed that tree as if he’d been born in it, lopping off limbs that hung out over a garage we had built below the hill. My grandfather wanted the tree down, and since it was on his property, it came down. I remember begging Jim not to cut it, but he said he wasn’t the boss, and he brought the leftover trunk to the ground right on top of a peg that he had driven into the ground – right where he said he’d drop it. Our whole house shook under its weight crashing into the earth.
My grandfather was convinced that the tree was dying and that when cut, it would show a cancerous rot running through its center. Instead, it was as solid as rock. It took me a while to forgive my grandfather for cutting it down, and I silently protested for a while by making sure he saw me playing on its barren stump.
We also had a grove of persimmon trees to the southwest of our house; they sat near my grandpa’s garden and each year we filled buckets with their fruit. Sassafras and tulip poplars and a great big chestnut oak on our front hill come back to me, too, and for some reason, I remember using an old book on trees I found at the library to help me label a leaf collection I made for high school. In our yard, and in the woods behind us, I found and tagged dozens of varieties: cottonwoods, turkey oaks, locusts and sumac, the often nuisance tree we only seem to notice in the fall when it has turned crimson weeks before much else has even a hint of color.
For me, it is now the best time of the year. The soybeans are turning to bronze, the ivies run red up tree trunks, and the first phase of fall is helping us take notice of how beautiful our trees are. I find myself driving slowly on my way home so I can see our valley change with the days; I linger before stepping into the house in the evening, just to get one last glimpse of our trees.
I could tell you about the trees I’ve planted around our place – the pin oaks, the pines, the hard maples — but that will serve another story on another day. For now, I’m happy to stand in the yard to watch golden showers from our wild cherry and black walnut trees, early treats. I am already crunching the dried leaves of our hackberry under my feet.
It may very well be true, if we think hard enough, that all of us have memories of trees. A backyard swing, a grandparent’s yard, a crudely built fortress of solitude … they are good thoughts to save for a birthday gift, like the ones I gave to myself today.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. His second book, “Sidelines: The Best of the Basketball Stories,” will be available this fall. Visit his Web page at mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: Reminiscing on a birthday brings back fond memories of trees
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
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Greece Passes New Austerity Deal Amid Rioting
'Rumor Has It' Adele's Rolling in the Grammys
Coroner: Houston Autopsy Results Weeks Away
Raw Video: Whitney Houston's Last Performance
Grohl, Grammy Nominees Cut Up on the Red Carpet
Raw Video: Greek Rioting Ahead of Austerity Vote
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Pop Music Superstar Whitney Houston Dies at 48
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79 Turtles Seized at Shanghai Airport
Police: Houston Found Dead in Her Hotel Room
Fans 'Speechless' Over Houston's Death
Today in History for Tuesday, February 12th
And the Winner for Best Super Bowl Ad Is...
Stocks Fall Sharply As Greek Deal Is Held Up
Arab League Wants U.N. Help in Syria
Sandusky Can See Grandkids, Have Local Jury
'Bachelor' Free Falls into the Ocean
Apple of their eye at $500 a share
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Rosenthal: A's sign Cespedes
Bobby Brown on Houston's Death
Turkey's first face transplant
Exclusive Video: Bobbi Kristina Leaving Hospital
Obama Unveils $3.8 Trillion Budget
Kelly Ripa's Fashion Faux Pas
Lusetich: AT&T Recap
Raw Video: Aurora Borealis As Seen From Space
Grammys 2012: Highlights
2.12: Pebble Beach Pro-Am -- Phil Mickelson
2012 Grammys: Rihanna
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Exclusive Video - Whitney's Bodybag
FUEL TV: Punk Payback Gym tips
