The other day I made a pair of millennials laugh like the funniest thing in the history of the world had happened, by “caw-cawing” in response to the caw-cawing of a pair of crows that were perched a yard or two above our heads, noisily trying to get the humans’ attention, in the branches of a PeeGee hydrangea at Amber Waves Farm, where I am helping out on the education team this summer. We were having a staff meeting, sitting and sweating in our dirty dungarees and Amber Waves trucker hats, when the Heckle and Jeckle pair overhead made loud, urgent exclamations and I reflexively answered. This seemed perfectly normal to me, but the millennials fell out laughing. I mean, they laughed like it was their first time seeing the “Ex-Parrot” sketch from “Monty Python.” Boy, were they tickled.
Apparently it’s more than a little bit weird for a middle-aged woman to answer the birds’ birdsong with a human simulation of birdsong. But, you know, the crows were so insistent.
I don’t want you to think I’m the sort of person who “communes with nature” by intention or as a, you know, cheesy personality trait. But now that the millennials have drawn my attention to it, I realize I have been, especially as I get older, maintaining running conversations not just with my avian neighbors but with, you know, the trees. I am forced to admit I am, quite literally, a tree-hugger. So sue me, millennials.
Wandering up and down Main Street on my nightly perambulations with Sweetpea, the dog, I visit familiar tree friends and, okay, I guess I do tend to address them out loud, so they can hear. I say things like, “Hello, old friend!” and I put out my hand and hold my palm for a moment on the rough-trenched bark of the elm. The craggy elm. This habit actually sounds annoying, even to me — I am annoying myself with this description of that whimsical person who, cloyingly, calls out in a cheery voice to the flora and fauna, like Carole and Paula on the 1970s toddler-television classic “The Magic Garden” — but I’m not doing it on purpose or because I think it’s cute. It’s just reflexive. Is the huge, magnificent, ancient tulip tree on the boundary between my lawn and the library lawn not a lifelong best friend? Is it not? Are the horse-chestnut trees, who I knew so well when I was a girl (and whose spiky husks scarred my knees) not dear old pals?
Here is an adage that is sentimental but also apropos: “New friends silver, old friends gold.” I actually heard that adage not from some wise old sage of a great-auntie, or something, but from RuPaul Charles on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” but that doesn’t make it less true. Old friends gold. The trees are always there. The trees outlive us all. Is it too much to say that they are a sort of reminder of eternity?
One of the trees I visit when out and about on Main Street with Sweetpea is a real “world’s homeliest dog” contest-winner of a tree: a hairy elm (I think? Someone will correct me.) that grows by the sidewalk near St. Luke’s Church, opposite the northern stile to the South End Burying Ground. This tree has a particularly homely appearance, like a witch with wiry hairs sprouting from her chin; the trunk is covered in shaggy outshoots. This tree is no beauty-contest winner, but I check on it fairly regularly because underneath it is the memorial plaque for my great-grandfather E.J. Edwards and great-grandmother Florence Huntting Edwards, placed there, of course, by the Ladies Village Improvement Society. These great-grandparents died some 60 and 70 years ago and I never knew them.
A memorial plaque beside a tree, and the tree itself, is a much nicer concrete remembrance than a tombstone. Is it not? It’s also nice that the departed are here among us, if we only look down to read the names.
I had somehow, in my mind, convinced myself that there was a memorial tree for my father, too, who died when I was 13, in front of the First Presbyterian Church, but, apparently that was a false memory. This past May, when I began my other current job — as church administrator at First Presbyterian — I went to look for my father’s plaque, which I was convinced was located near the corner of Main and David’s Lane, but I found only the one nearby memorializing my paternal grandfather, Arnold Rattray, in front of the white-shingled manse. Arnold’s tree had become diseased and dangerous to passers-by and had to be taken down a few weeks before my arrival in the church office (a circumstance I’m trying not to take as some sort of portent). I found the plaque poking out of the ground there, alone, waiting for the new tree to go in, which it has. A healthy young sapling grows.
My friend Olivia Brooks, East Hampton’s Queen of Trees as the chairwoman of the L.V.I.S. tree committee, tells me that the ladies have a database documenting more than 750 such memorial plaques around the village and that the first memorial-tree plaques were installed in 1937, including one that year for Welby Boughton, the late editor of The East Hampton Star. (No, the L.V.I.S. has not “lost track” of the plaques, as was mistakenly stated in this newspaper last week, ruffling a few feathers and setting off a bit of caw-cawing.) I will not accuse Olivia of tree-hugging or tree-patting, or talking to birds in trees, but she is high ranking among the fellowship of the trees, the Friends of the Deciduous, and tells me that she does say “hi” to the memorial plaque for Louis Vetault when she is walking past Wittendale’s Florist.
Back in the day, when children were constantly wandering around outside alone — and of course doing so without an iPhone or iPad, so not viewing the entirety of earthly creation through a scrim, as a giant selfie backdrop — my friends and I paid a lot more attention to things like horse chestnuts, the crunch of fallen leaves, and trees with brass memorial plaques beneath them. I can remember an argument with Daisy Dohanos, when we were perhaps 9 or 10, about whether or not the dead were buried beneath the trees, with the memorial plaques as headstones; she said yes, I said no. We used to meander in November or December up and down Main Street, between the penny candy destination of Whimsey’s (Swedish Fish and licorice pipes) and Children’s Theater rehearsals at Guild Hall (Thornton Wilder and Cole Porter), playing the very low-tech game of stamping on the small, hard, round fruits of a tree that may have been a Bradford pear with the soles of our Bass Weejuns to hear the “pop!” they made when crushed. We carved our initials into the smooth gray trunk of what may have been an American beech near the corner of Dayton Lane.
The Guardian newspaper reports this week on a study by an academic named Miles Richardson, a “professor of nature connectedness” at the University of Derby, that says humans have been experiencing an “extinction of experience.” This “extinction” is defined as “the loss of nature from people’s lives over 220 years” and the study quantified it using “data on urbanisation, the loss of wildlife in neighbourhoods, and parents no longer engaging their children in nature.” Professor Richardson says our “connection to nature has declined by more than 60 percent since 1800, almost exactly mirroring the disappearance of nature words such as ‘river,’ ‘moss,’ and ‘blossom’ from books.”
So perhaps it’s no wonder that there is a generation gap, with the X-es, Boomers, and Greatest Generation casually hallooing at winged things and offering encouragement to hairy elms, while the millennials are surprised to hilarity by a short salutation addressed to the crows. Probably, our great-great-grandparents thought nothing of carrying on entire conversations with whales and fish hawks. (This may explain “Moby-Dick”!)
Anyway, now the millennials have made me all self-conscious. Now, the problem is that I have been made aware of my own nature-talking and I’m not sure I will be able to continue unself-consciously addressing the beeches and the corvids and the red foxes.
These millennials. So conformist. Even on the farm.