Under The Giant Hackberry Tree

The smell of snuffed candles. An organ postlude wafts through wooden church doors out over just-fallen snow. Under a giant hackberry tree, a lamb, someone’s tiny pony, hay bales, Mother and Child. Across the street, Charlie Boyd’s tinsel and lights, so garish by day, look just about perfect shrouded by snow. It is Christmas Eve 1976, and all of this happened in the one hour we were inside, as if on cue.

Celtis occidentalis, the common Hackberry, gets little respect. Its jagged tooth-edged leaves. Its tart mealy berries. Its lack of a colorful native name. Its wanton indiscretion about where it chooses to thrive.

Harbinger of nipple gall, powdery mildew, witch’s broom, jumping plant lice and a host of grisly arboreal ailments.

When horticulturalists grasp to sing its praise, its corky ridged and warty bark is what they settle on.

This unsung, wanton tree just happens to be the tree that marks the seasons of my life.

That simple living nativity under the hackberry’s winter bare branches, and the sudden magic of new fallen snow, is my first real memory of Christmas.

Decades later, its jagged irregular ovalish leaves provided May-perfect dappled sunlight for my sister’s wedding.

In high school, under a pelting February rain, a few days after a car full of classmates had careened down a steep ravine, Mr. Harding and Reverend Kimmel gently snaked the line of overflow mourners out from the hackberry’s inadequate shelter and into the breezeway, while more folding chairs were brought for them to the sanctuary. For the first time that I remember, that big yellow room did not seem sunny.

During Holy Week, a rough wooden cross is erected beneath its bud swollen branches, a cross that will be draped with a black cloth on Friday before we deck it with hyacinths and daffodils on Easter.

A silent presence through so many seasons of my life, I have always felt a certain kinship with this hackberry, perhaps because it bears a small bronze plaque declaring it the tallest tree of its kind in 1971, the year of my birth.

Tall Tree Winner, 1971

In the late seventies the hackberry was struck by lightening. Severely pruned in the aftermath, and rigged with wires, it has flourished in the decades I have been away.

For several years, when I would trek back to my old hometown and revisit haunts and dip my toes in the Cuyahoga’s waters, I would inevitably make my way the few blocks from the river to the public square that Judge Josiah Stow dedicated in 1830 for the free expression of divine worship. Ours was not to be a town dominated by a single spire, but in the square, a plot for the Methodist Society, a plot for the Episcopalians, and a plot for the Campbellites; on the green, a place for the Congregationalists; and just above the sublime ferny sandstone grottoes of the Glens, a church for the Catholics.

Disciples of Christ Church, Church Square, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

On my return visits, suddenly this tree, this silent, nondescript backdrop to my formative years, loomed large.

I began to notice it: I loved the shadow dance of floodlit branches on the building’s façade on a windy October night. Of a summer Sunday morning, I loved how its canopy of small jagged leaves dappled the eastern sun. The hackberry’s shade is not the gloom of a big leafed maple, or the solid cover of a mighty oak, but something enlivening and brisk and animated, a canopy that mottles but does not smother the sunlight.

I’ve never known the grace of elm trees, or the majesty of our native chestnuts, now vanished from the American landscape. This sturdy common hackberry is what I have to mark the decades of my life.

I love that any day now this sturdy survivor just might overtake the spire of the big church that was erected behind it. The old architect’s rendering of the new sanctuary, framed on a stairway in the basement, shows a circular driveway with fin tailed sedans where the hackberry stands, and a parking lot in the center of Judge Stow’s Church Square.

Sometimes we have the collective wisdom to not heed all of the experts’ recommendations. So the humble common hackberry tree continues to thrive, long after those postwar landboats moulder in an automotive grave.

I have almost completed my first set of seasons back under the old hackberry tree, my first as an adult in my old hometown.  Not a Sunday goes by that I don’t pause to look up at its branches, to watch the sunlight filter through small serrated leaves, to watch snow coat the windward side of its jagged trunk, to watch small yellow leaves fall on an autumn lawn. And yes, to appreciate even its warty bark, ridged and corky.

In a few weeks buds will swell and leaves will unfurl again, sometime soon after we place daffodils on the old rugged cross beneath its boughs. As I walk out into the dappled sunlight, whatever hymn we have just sung will still be ringing in my head. I will look up at that canopy, composed of rough, imperfect, ovoid leaves, borne on this scaly warty trunk, a trunk rigged with lightening rods and cables, a tree susceptible to all sorts of ailments. A beautiful tree, all the more majestic in its imperfection.

I’ll look up at each of those sawtooth leaf blades, and I will think, these small imperfect leaves on this big tree are all the souls who set aside this square, who built these churches, who sang these songs.

In these songs we remember our faith, our scriptures, our theology. In this tree live all those saints, who sang our songs before us. Mr. Harding who held the front door open for you long after you had been away. Mrs. Underwood who wore a wide-brimmed hat. Mrs. Haught who made you a felt stocking in Preschool. Dr. Drake who signed your Bible in a left slanting script. Kevin who plunged into the ravine, Nancy whose smile lit the room, Steve who left us far too soon.

Ancient gnarled Silver Maple on Church Square.

So many seasons under this old tree, shedding its leaves, dropping some branches, bearing small sweet fruit through the depth of winter after the showier berries are long gone. Then it buds out again, faithfully, sometime shortly after the dogwood trees.

Mother of Presidents

I seek the back roads of Connecticut's old Western Reserve.

The places where you no longer need a map.

The places where a weather-battered general store sinks at an intersection where one road takes you to Burton, and the other, eventually, to Cleveland.

Freed from the platted irregularities of towns plunked down wherever there happened to be good and sufficient water to power a mill, or places where canal boats deposited their wares, or a places where someone came up with a better way to make matchsticks or mechanical harvesters or ball bearings, you find yourself in the pure geography of the American frontier.

You get away from the varicose population centers, snarled with curving streets and cul de sacs and outerbelts. You find yourself in Rootstown, or Atwater, or Palmyra, one of those perfect five-mile square townships with an eponymous village at its core, with a white frame congregational church on a patch of green, in a place where Connecticut veterans settled on plots granted to them for their suffering after the British burned coastal towns.

And so I find myself in Troy, Ohio, on a President's Day weekend when the grass is winter gold.

An Amish boy ties his single-horse cart to a post at the Marathon station.

A wood frame warehouse peels paint perceptibly.

Twin tire tracks transect a windswept graveyard.

I don't know anything about Troy, Ohio, but its little cemetery has the best collection of cast metal grave markers I have ever seen.

Cast metal grave markers remain crisp and legible, while neighboring stone markers weather to become blank slates. A flag has fallen  to the grass next to a Civil War veteran's grave.

 I am stalking a dead president. James A. Garfield, to be exact.

The last president born in a log cabin.

A president raised by a widowed mother on a hardscrabble farm in these very hills.

A President who drove canal boats, who studied at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, who roved on the Ohio frontier as a Disciples of Christ preacher, who returned to the Eclectic to teach classics, and within a year became its president.

A President who rose to the rank of Brigadeer General in the Civil War, who was eventually elected to this country's highest office.

Because I am in that part of the Western Reserve where the roads, except where they are Indian trails, run straight and true, I know if I head toward where the sun rises, I will find myself at Hiram, where the president taught school.

And so I do. A handsome brick Disciples of Christ church anchors one corner in Hiram, Ohio, while across a one-light intersection on a windswept little hillock, a little frame meeting house, like the one the president might have preached in, faces route 700.

A statue of the slain president rests on a sandstone pedestal. In Ohio our most important monuments always sit on a base of our native sandstone.

From there I settle on some winding roads through the Charin Valley, through the headwaters of the Cuyahoga. I know if I head due north, eventually I will find myself at Lake Erie.

And so on a February afternoon when winds whip clouds rapidly across a sun trying valiantly to shine down on brown grass, I find myself in a cemetery where angels with eroded faces gaze toward a brilliant firmament, and alabaster obelisks to barons assert themselves toward the sky.

On another hillock, a monument to a martyred president, this one an impossibly ornate sandstone pile crowned with gargoyles and friezes depicting a president's triumphant moments and agonizing death in sharp relief.

On this Presidents Day weekend I am the only one here at Cleveland's Lakeview Cemetery. Massive turquoise-painted wooden doors atop a grand staircase are splintered and locked.

I wander the hillsides past polychromatic stone "garden crypts," rendered all the more colorful by a season's lush moss carpet on sandstone walls. Statues of winged mercury, shrouded urns, allegorical maidens.

This grand place seems so far from those humble township centers.

I meander due south, down route 91, toward home, past the replica log cabin of Garfield's birth at Moreland Hills, and marvel at how sometimes the journeys you take, when you lose the map and just follow the roads, take you where you never intended, but needed to go.

These backroad rambles. These purposeful excuses to drift and tarry.

Certain intersections, where the boards are battered and weathered, where the graves are marked and tended, where the native sandstone is worn and mossy, can transport you to a revelatory place, where you see these hills where you were born and roved, not as a tired and spent place, but as a place where chestnut trees towered, and homesteads were forged, and classics were taught at windswept hillocks where geography decreed that roads would transect, in an unlikely woodland republic.

A Vineyard in Winter

February's full moon sets in a pink morning sky over a vineyard that smells pungently of skunk.

January's placid, frigid solitude gives way to lengthening days and the discernible stirring of critters. There is no evidence that our innumerable groundhogs have roused themselves from their rocky warrens. (I suspect the famous Pennsylvania rodent is forcibly roused from his every February 2nd.) But the lingering odor of amorous skunks roving den to den is one sign change is afoot.

Robins, red breasted harbingers of spring, never really disappear in the winter, but are suddenly more prominent, pecking lasciviously at crab apples that remain, somehow, on a shrub near the crush house.

Canada geese leave web footed prints as they waddle through vineyard rows pecking for grubs and lingering grape seeds. Chased out of Eden and onto the frozen lake, they slide and struggle to gain enough speed to take flight to a neighboring, more hospitable lake.

Gina and Guiseppe, our resident mute swans, hunker near the moving waters at the inlet, then glide unperturbed and regal across the lake once the sun warms the waters, pausing periodically to arch graceful necks below the surface.

Normally they pay me no mind, but lately I find them gliding toward me, plucking bits of food off the lake's barnstone edge near wherever I happen to be, and dropping morsels below water to retrieve in one graceful motion. Unlike geese who graze on land, swans feed only off the lake's bottom, and this newfound interest in bits of food at the water's edge indicates they may have eaten the bottom clean.

Native Americans call this the Hunger Moon, and although February is a time when certain days bring bright sunshine and warm rays, it is also when last season's food begins to run out.

The swans anticipate the supplemental food we now place out for them each day, although Guiseppe has taken to swimming aggressively toward me with a fierce back paddle kick, with Gina trailing more languidly but still with considerable speed. They beat me across the lake to the feed bowl, and Guiseppe lunges toward me, indicating that once the feed is in the bowl, I am politely requested to get about my other business. While Gina plucks morsels from the bowl and drops them below water to retrieve, Guiseppe circles the bowl, puffed up and serious, and follows me to the other side of the lake to make sure I don't get a notion to come back too soon.

Our resident swans have also displayed a new found interest in twigs and branches on the lake bottom, indicating that perhaps sometime soon after the grape buds break, we will have cygnets gliding awkwardly behind their graceful parents, perhaps from a nest in the marshy area over near where the sharp-kneed heron roosts.

February is a time of anticipation and preparation. Last year's growth is pruned from hoarfrost crusted grapevines, then weighed to assess the vigor of last year's canopy, and determine the fruitfulness of this year's anticipated crop.

One sign after another. Newly pungent mornings. Tracks on new fallen snow. Lengthening days. The gathering of twigs and branches. The indiscernible swelling of buds.

Winter is not a dormant season, but a time of invisible preparation, a time of pregnant anticipation, a time of pink horizons at sunrise and days careening from sun to snow to ice to rain.

Some mornings after a wet snow and then a cold night, the vineyard sparkles like diamonds. Other mornings it is a symphony of brown grass and bare trunks, except where piercing sun suddenly illuminates startling green moss and lichen.

Winter in the vineyard is a brutal, beautiful season, when abundant future growth mingles with present deprivation, and when fierce winds sometimes give way to some of the year's best light.