Trees, leaves, autumn

I wasn’t certain I would make deadline. Probably you would not have been much disturbed had these words not appeared, or even noticed the column’s absence. The editor, however, would have been miffed, would have had to find something to fill the space. Not a heavy lift, that, but an unexpected chore, plugging a hole on the page as press time neared.

Blame it on that window. That one, there, a few feet from my desk, which as it happens is on line of sight with the computer screen and just above and beyond it. Thus in plain view are the old oaks, which two angry storms in five months tried but failed to uproot. Only blocks from my office, perhaps three minutes in light traffic, the winds took oaks the same size, or larger, to the street. Elms, too, and pines. They crushed homes and apartments and businesses, blocked avenues and isolated neighborhoods, ripped away utility lines that carried electricity and brought the world to houses and conference rooms via the internet, and then shoved aside the creosoted poles that had supported the wires.

Dendrology: the study of woody plants. This year, much of the state, too much, got a crude lesson in that particular science, meaning the opportunity to examine the root structures of trees that were in their second centuries or, in some instances, quite possibly their third. The exposure was less from incision than evisceration, witness the gaping holes left when nature sent straight-line winds roaring across the landscape, pushing nature’s grandest flora from the soil.

Eaves and shingles and roofs and windows, homes and shops and schools and vehicles — sacrificed to the storms. Perspective is demanded: Lost, also, were lives and livelihoods. Everything is temporary, but the most valuable things are irreplaceable.

Still, there is room for gratitude for the canopy that was not shorn, to include the pair of wonders that began as acorns well before I began as a zygote. And quite before the debut of my grandson, the young fellow who this very day is pretending to do his homework, sitting crosslegged on the carpet to one side of my credenza. His fifth-grade textbooks and a wire-bound pad surround him, weighing almost as much as he does; and pencils and felt-tipped markers are here and there, and when did refillable water bottles become as necessary to elementary school social standing as designer polo shirts? Anyway.

“They’re changing color, some of them,” he says, taking my attention away from the on-screen menu of adjectives I had summoned in hopes of finding one appropriate to a certain jackass of the Arkansas General Assembly. “The leaves,” he explained, surveying the limbs that seemed so close we two could touch them through the glass.

Indeed. Green was still the dominant hue by far, but it was slowly being challenged by the shift of season. Look closely and the tawny tones of autumn were steadily, stealthily encroaching, beginning at the edges of the leaves and creeping inward. Already the amber had darkened to brown, overpowering and then displacing the green; witness the thin but growing layer of lifeless matter that the thus-far gentle breezes of October were scattering from beneath the branches and onto the surrounding pavement.

“When will they start to really fall?” he asked.

In just a few days, I replied, not really certain, but confident enough that the cooler mornings and shorter days and stronger winds would begin their work soon enough.

He and his mom and dad only weeks ago moved into their new home, the one they had built in a new, nearby subdivision, on a level lot with rising mortgage interest rates. They chose their lot wisely: To one side of their house is a greenbelt on a slope so steep that constructing anything there would daunt the Corps of Engineers. The forest, and essentially it is that, is bordered by a little brook that starts somewhere and makes its way to somewhere else, and alongside it grow ferns and wildflowers, and in it flourish tadpoles and their elders, and probably some other species; and it only makes sense that in the dark of the night rabbits and racoons and opossums and squirrels, maybe a deer or four, will gather as if at the corner saloon.

“All our trees that we put in are doing good,” the kid says, referring to the dozen or so that he and his parents had planted against their rear fence. They’ll have plenty of shade there, though probably not before their offspring, my companion this afternoon, is in his junior year at college.

“I really like trees,” he tells me. “They’re really important.”

Yes, they are. They make so many other — things, jackasses —not important.