During the seventeen years my wife and I have lived here together our live oak seems to have declined in health. It took a kicking in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and lost a lot of canopy during Gustav that it has never succeeded in regenerating. Now, while its elegant long limbs still stretch out their embrace around the house’s back porch, its canopy is thin and its trunk pitted with fissures. Possibly for centuries, the thing has stood here in perfectly good health, enduring whatever time and the seasons have thrown at it. To have it not survive our brief watch would not seem a very good reflection of our gardening skills. So this winter we are finally getting some expert help, and asking an arborist to come and see what can be done to ensure that our tree is still around for another generation (or two). In the meantime there are plenty of acorns to gather and plant. There aren’t many things that we everyday folk can do that truly have the chance to live on, give pleasure and invoke reflection long after we’re gone, but surely, planting a live oak is one of them.
A couple of weeks back I was home with the kids, who were out early from school for some reason. I glanced outside to see Mathilde, an apple in her mouth and a book in her lap, absorbed in her reading and just drifting back and forth on that swing, lost in her own world. I don’t know whether she really is a direct descendant of the person who planted our tree, but looking at her out there on that swing, I like to think that whoever it was would have approved.
• Country Roads is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2013. Fun fact: The first issues of the magazine were produced on the dining room table of the house in 1983—with those live oak branches overhead.
