Old Trees

The best part about growing up in a small southern town is that you have just enough of the amenities of modern life without having to give up the things about the country that most folks cherish. It wasn’t like we were living out on the prairie somewhere and going to the general store was something that you only did once every five or six months. At the same time, if I wanted a quiet stroll in the woods or to play down by the train tracks then those things were readily accessible as well.

As teenagers we had our hangouts. We didn’t go to the movies every weekend because Vincent didn’t have a theater. The closest one that we had was about 20 miles away in Sylacauga. A ticket was $1.50 so there were plenty of times that our parents chose that for our entertainment. But when you start hanging out with friends you tend to stick closer to home. The fact that the gasoline is being paid for out of your pocket instead of a weekly allowance might have something to do with that.

But when I think of hanging out in the truest sense of the phrase I really think of where I preferred to spend my alone time. I’ve always been a person that was very comfortable spending time alone. There is something about the silence when no one expects you to be “on” that I’ve always enjoyed. Not that I don’t like being around people. My family is still the most important thing in my life. But ever since I was a child I’ve cherished the solitude that came in being by myself.

One of the places that a kid can seem to find a moment of peace is either in the branches or at the foot of an old tree.

Small town America has no shortage of old trees. As I said, we had a fast food place. We also had a decent video store with no shortage of classic horror (another favorite pastime of mine). But being nestled in the foothills of Appalachia, there were trees everywhere. Some of them were put there by mother nature and some of them were planted by the hands of a human. Many of them were purposely placed next to a building or had the structure designed around it to keep it intact.

We loved our trees back then.

I can think of a couple of my favorites as I sit here. I would have to say that at the top of my list was the giant oak tree that used to be right in front of the high school. It wasn’t old in the way the ancient redwoods are old. But in my teenage mind it was a relic of another time. It had been planted back in the 40s when my grandparents had been students at the same school. As a matter of fact there had been more than one occasion that my grandmother said to me “We planted that tree” when we would drive past the school. That made me think that she had actually dug the hole that the sapling had been placed in. Thinking back now I seriously doubt that was the case.

This was one of those epic trees that you find is just part of the construct that is your life. That tree was always there. When my mom would drop me off at school in the morning I would walk by it and run my hand across it’s trunk. I spent more than a few afternoons sitting beneath it with a book. It was a common target during class pranks. But while you would expect someone to deface it with a can of spray paint or something, we all had too much respect for it. The worst it ever got was a little toilet paper and some shaving cream. 

It was a majestic elder that presided over us throughout our lives. And then the corporate designers came in sometime around 1989. They had been hired by the school board to update our school. They wanted it to look less like a high school from the 1960s...which is the thing I liked most about it...and become a modern center for quality education. According to their blueprints the only way they could make that happen was if they removed the old tree.

We signed petitions. We had parents stand up in school meetings. There were battles the scale of which could not be done justice in a movie with both Morgan Freeman AND Michelle Pfeifer. In the end we won and the construction company redesigned the entire new layout to keep the tree intact.

One year later it was discovered that the tree was diseased and was a risk of falling and killing us. You’d think they would have checked that out first. The tree came down.

You win some...am I right?

Another old tree that I reminisce about sometimes is an old elm tree on my grandfather’s property. It is still there...or at least it was the last time I was there. It was right on the edge of his front yard next to a retaining wall. That meant that you could climb up easily on the yard side and then make your way over to the other side and find yourself easily twenty feet in the air. That made for a lot of fun for a kid that had a death wish and wanted to hurl himself off a branch and risk breaking an ankle when he lands. I know this because it is something that I did plenty of times.

This memory is also the reason that I would never allow my kids to play around this tree.

It’s really hard when you have kids that want to climb everything that might get them more than a foot off the ground. You find yourself grasping at straws to keep them occupied enough. One of my go-to solutions was usually storytelling.

Storytelling is a nice way of saying that I lied to them.

“You can’t climb that tree, Austin,” I said.

“Why not?” he replied.

I fumbled for a reason that wasn’t a simple because I told you not to. 

“There’s a witch in there,” I said. 

Austin was skeptical but I had Gracie’s undivided attention.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s an old witch that lives in that tree. If you climb it you could fall right into her stove.”

Okay, typing it out now I see how horrible it was. But it worked. That tree never caused an injury in my family.

I can’t say the same for the old crabapple tree that was on my other grandfather’s property. That tree caused two generations of “butt-whippings”.

The one most directly related to me happened the time that my grandmother caught myself and my little brother pulling crabapples out of the branches and hurling them at one another. Now, my grandmother has always been under the impression that crabapples were good for eating. She used to make jellies and things like that out of them. She was wrong. Crabapples, or crap-apples as I call them, are disgusting. The only thing that God ever put them on this planet for was to hurl at your little brother.

But, my grandmother and her switch had different plans. I can still feel the stripes on my legs.

Turns out, my dad had a run-in with that tree when he was a kid, too. The story goes that he got into trouble at school for something and there had been a phone call made. So, by the time he stepped off the school bus the jig was up. He got home and took off toward the barn and climbed that tree.

My grandfather, being a rather patient man, got a chair from the porch and placed it under that tree. He took his belt off and sat down. Then he and my dad had a stand-off. My dad sat in the tree for hours and my grandfather sat there at the foot of it for the same amount of time. When it had gotten good and dark and my dad’s stomach was sufficiently empty he climbed down. He bent over and accepted his licks and went on with life.

There’s a lot of memories in those old trees. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. All of them are just pages in the story of our lives. And they’re all bonafide and southern fried.