For the past week I explored some of New England, from Fenway to Franklin NH. In Derry, I visited the Robert Frost farm and spent several hours walking where he had trod. When we left, I took along a memento - a pen with turned maple, housed in a maple case whose cover is enscribed with a stanza from "Tree At My Window".
Frost had habitually sat at a table by a window to write, and just beyond that window had grown an old maple, generally thought to be the one "...at his window".
When the tree failed a few years back, it was felled, and some of it was salvaged to become such trinkets as I brought home. Glad I had that opportunity.
"Weep for the small things that could make them glad."
Here in central Indiana we still have plenty of Squirrel's and birds along with the wind to plant the new trees! It just takes very few years for vacant land to become a dense woods when allowed to revert.
I heated with wood for about 8 years, much of the wood I felled was from a abandoned elevated interurban railway that was between two fields on a farm. There were Sycamore's and Cottonwood's that exceeded 3 foot in diameter at the base ~ the railway had only been abandoned for about 60 ~ 70 years. there were wild Cherry that exceeded 12" in diameter. The area also had ash, elm, locust and some other varieties of trees. The farmer wanted the area cleared as the trees were invading his crops and shading quite an area.
At another area near there was a dense woods, I was cutting across the road when a deputy sheriff stopped and told me his father had farmed the area when he was young but stopped when it flooded out for several years about 40 years ago. It also had some pretty large trees.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth. Then took the other as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear, though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same. And both that morning equally lay, in leaves no step had trodden black. Oh I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how way leads unto way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
That's one of two Frost poems I committed to memory about 50 years ago. Thanks for the memories.
It sounds like a path I took this weekend. While it is a little early for the Fall color change down at the cabin, there is a little change. I've hacked out my own trails through my favorite woods and marshes for my photo safaris. It is surrounded by a Wildlife Management Area, which is being managed to restore Red-cockated Woodpecker habitat that calls for a more open forest with regular burning of the understory like precolonial times. While the trees are all tall pines, the floor is blanked with the yellow of Narrow-leaf Sunflower.
I can still trace the old roadway where it dropped off into the creek bottoms before the highways were built long ago. My 97 year old neighbor grew up near there and I love to dig into his memory bank for local history. Last time we visited, I was asking about road maintenance back when he was a kid. He told me the fellows name who had the mule drawn grader and where he lived, about a mile from my grandparents place. When it was time to grade past any homeplace the owner would need to be there with his team to add to or replace the others. He said when they crossed one farm, then the next farmer would hitch his team on as they crossed his property.
I've found some beech trees with names and dates carved into the bark from ~ 1934 that I can still make out. One couple got married, and the husband dies in the fifties, while the widow lived past 2000. I wish I'd found this tree and tracked her down to interview her. I'll bet she would have remembered the day her boyfriend carved their names, and wondered if she would admit to any romantic stuff that might have ensued. ha
This is on a sign at Grayton Beach State Park in Grayton, FL (just east of Destin and just west of Panama City). Sorry, the formatting didn't transfer well.
