The life of a tree. A few years ago, someone found a photo of my home in the city archives, circa the 1880s. The house was a decade or two old by that point; as far as I can tell from the records, the elderly gent pictured is the original owner/builder. By the time I acquired the place, the upstairs porch had been removed—I intend to rebuild it, in time—and those trees, and the many others on the lot, had grown extensively. In 2008, Hurrican Ike, while “only” a category 4, was so strong that after hitting the southern coast of the US from the Gulf of Mexico, continued in a fierce storm inland well into the central part of the country. When it hit here, it ravaged one of those trees pictured. It had by then grown to such a size that the fallen tree covered about a quarter of the width of my front yard, the whole of a neighbor’s yard, and had its topmost part jutting into the yard of the neighbor beyond them. Not sure how many years it had accumulated in total, but by then it was at the least 128 y/o.
November 8th, 2011
9:13pm
