In Love With Trees

It's easy to fall in love with trees while strolling aimlessly about on a 1000-acre garden at the beginning of spring. That's what we decided to do for our last-chance get-away before our children outnumber us. (Longwood Gardens, PA) Like I told D, after this we won't have romance anymore. It'll just be arguing, macaroni & cheese and yelling at the kids from here on out. But if this really was our last fling - it was also our best. We soaked up acres of bloom and bud - slept in past 7 o'clock - and had a two-day uninterrupted conversation. We pretended to be first time parents while missing our children at home. I became reaquainted with my fascination with trees and bought a wonderful copy of A Natural History of North American Trees in which Donald Culross Peattie "writes about trees the way Thoreau writes about Walden Pond." We dreamt of the gardens in our future and wondered if heaven would be well-tended or wild. It was good to be in love and to love nature as much as we possibly could in one day, to "keep in the heart the journal nature keeps."

KEEP IN THE HEART THE JOURNAL - Conrad Aiken

Keep in the heart the journal nature keeps;

Mark down the limp nasturtium leaf with frost;

See that the hawthorn bough is ice-embossed,

And that the snail, in season, has his grief;

Design the winter on the window pane;

Admit pale sun through cobwebs left from autumn;

Remember summer when the flies are stilled;

Remember spring, when the cold spider sleeps.

Such diary, too, set down as this: the heart

Beat twice or thrice this day for no good reason;

For friends and sweethearts dead before their season;

For wisdom come too late, and come to naught.

Put down "the hand that shakes," "the eye that glazes";

The "step that falters betwixt thence and hence";

Observe that hips and haws burn brightest red

When the North Pole and sun are most apart.

Note that the moon is here, as cold as ever,

With ages on her face, and ice and snow;

Such as the freezing mind alone can know,

When loves and hates are only twigs that shiver.

Add in a postscript that the rain is over,

The wind from southwest backing to the south,

Disasters all forgotten, hurts forgiven;

And that the North Star, altered, shines forever.

Then say: I was a part of nature's plans;

Knew her cold heart, for I was consciousness;

Came first to hate her, and at last to bless;

Believed in her; doubted; believed again.
My love the lichen had such roots as I,-

The snowflake was my father; I return,

After this interval of faith and question,

To nature's heart, in pain, as I began.