If These Trees Could Talk
{Many people across the southeast have suffered from the damage of Helene in ways I cannot imagine and this small piece of it in my hometown is in no way intended to minimize the obvious losses that are incomparable to these I write here. My heart goes out to those experiencing great, grievous losses.}
If you’ve spent more than 15 minutes with me over the last month, you have heard that my hometown was hit hard by Hurricane Helene. This one seemingly came out of nowhere. My family there went to sleep having secured porch furniture knowing that the expected 35-45 miles per hour winds would certainly stir some things around. As the hurricane shifted east, our little town swayed, bent, twisted and literally broke in pieces under 103 miles per hour winds that decided to rest a spell over it. It was not welcome. As my brother tried to wait until the sun came up to assess the damage, all manner of things waited in the dark... not at all where they should be. Just before sun up my brother couldn’t wait any longer and once he realized the roads were impassable in his truck, he set out with his flashlight to walk to the family drugstore that my dad opened up 50 plus years ago that he now runs.
And, for him and the rest of the town, the next 2-3 weeks were a blur, smeared, uninvited, onto the history of our small town.
Since Soperton is 115 miles from the coast, the effects of a hurricane look different for us. We are known as the “Million Pines City”—for the exact reason the name implies. A cotton farmer planted seven million pines back in the 20's and we never stopped. Timber, pines, pulpwood, pine straw—this is what we know.
My friend, Margaret, wrote “There’s nothing like pine-tree green against a southern-blue sky,” and she’s right. No one is necessarily going to call a pine tree pretty but we do. They are our pines. They are the landscape we know. They are the landscape of my childhood. They are the familiar shapes that I expect in my peripheral vision when I walk by windows in the home in which I grew up, when I go for walks in the mornings, and when I drive to the store or to a friend’s house. When I was there last week, the views I took in all over town were unsettling but the ones down our beautiful driveway onto the land my parents built our home in 1974 evoked emotion I wasn’t expecting. Through blurry eyes, my vision felt askew. I felt askew.
The landscape was off. Trees that stood tall and proud just could not hold to the ground in that kind of wind and so now, they laid long – very long- and lifeless all around the yard.
And like many families who have acreage of planted trees—either for their main income or for investment purposes—we look across those plots of land and thousands of trees are all the way down—some groups of them laying like pixie sticks-- and just as many or more are leaning having disconnected from their root systems and just won’t recover. The emptiness of sky once filled and the leaning landscape kept throwing me off as I worked in the house and drove to different places.
Askew. Off. Not as it once was.
If these trees could talk….
They would tell you in 1974 our young family of four spent our first nights in the house that Christmas and how my dad shook jingle bells outside mine and my brother’s room from the balcony to assure us that Santa knew right where the Dennard kiddos were that Christmas.
Those trees watched that formless yard take shape as shrubs and other trees were planted – most notable being the enormous azalea bed in the front, the dogwood trees in the back and the Japanese maple in the largest courtyard.
They could bear witness to the hard knocks experienced by a brother and sister-- of riding a bike for the first time, swinging a bat to hit a ball, perfecting a football spiral, learning to drive a motorcycle and a mini bike, figuring out what to do on a skateboard, navigating roller skates and the sister having to always be the one in the middle playing “keep away”. Talk about hard knocks. They remember the brother catching a love for fishing, for hunting as he ventured further and further from their immediate shelter.
They would tell you about three brides who wanted parts of their wedding day in the midst of them and how they stood as sentinels over the landscape for each one. They knew no one really noticed but that's okay.
They watched the dad who, after work, loved to be in his garden before dinner—taking a few minutes for quiet, satisfied by watching things grow, harvesting them and bringing them up to the house for the mom to cook them {or blanch and freeze for another time}.
They would tell you about the sister who loved being outside—who found smaller trees with more branches to climb, who spent hours at the little creek in an imaginary world with the poison ivy to prove it, who turned a million flips on the trampoline and in the yard as a wanna be gymnast. Those trees had to wince with every dropped baton as she practiced for half time shows for Friday night football games and probably wished they could provide more shade as she decided sun bathing was a good idea.
If they could talk I know they would tell of the countless friends and family that drove down that driveway under and through them—over and over and over again—just to be together, to share a dinner, to go out for dinner, for EVERY kind of celebration, to feed the bird dogs, for a date, to drop something off, to watch a football game, to play a few hands of bridge, or to come by for the purpose to comfort in the midst of loss...
They've held much under and among them. They held the life of a family of four.
If they could talk, they'd say something like that.
{We are grateful for many things in the aftermath of this storm. There was no loss of life. We praise God for that. As Denise would say, it's okay to hold grief and gratitude at the same time. The people of the town rallied and cared well for each other. Incredibly well. I am so proud of my brother and how he led and worked tirelessly to make sure people had what they needed and how he continued to meet the needs of his customers from day 1. His staff and his family served and worked right alongside him. There is MUCH to be proud of.}
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