Life's Sudden Changes
In March of 1986 I moved into my present house, since when I have enjoyed these houses (and their successive owners) that are opposite mine.
Just before sunset on March 14, 2015, having the telephoto lens on the camera (and having photographed this house repeatedly), this was taken to record the incipient budding of the righthand pin oak in the parkway in front of the pale green house. I like this kind of even, dim light. These paired pin oaks (there are others just like them on other streets) may be about the same age (1920s) as the houses. The trees behind the houses are much shorter.
On the morning of March 23, I was awakened by the most dreadful din: not merely like a wretched leaf-blower. The orange machine is the grinder that most efficiently makes flakes of wood out of branches and trunks of hard wood. No, it wasn't the tallow tree, though it sounded just as close to my house. It already had filled the truck once to take away (compare above) all the upper parts of the righthand tree and the lower branches of the one to the left. The azaleas had burst into full bloom overnight. The pale sky was not that of dusk but white fog. I was astonished. Two major hurricanes that came right through Baton Rouge, Andrew and Gustave, which took down so many pecans and red oaks, had not touched these straight-trunked giants, three times the height of the houses.
In another hour or two. the orange machine was being fed the trunks, which it speedily consumed. The five men worked with efficient skill. None of them were speaking English, but whether Spanish or Cajun I was unsure. Now I could see the section of the trunks, and could conclude, I think, that these were the same pin oaks, or swamp oaks, or (simply) red oaks, the species that Hurricane Gustave had decimated, though without taking so much as branches off these, the largest ones, which, if I guess rightly, were as much as ninety years old, though even as saplings they don't appear in the c. 1912 photos of Roseland Terrace (here some of the earliest-built bungalows, before c. 1925, only one block off Government Street).
Not that I'm certain of the species of the trees; their bark seems thin for oaks of any kind. And, by the way, I don't know who ordered them taken down. Possibly it was found, during the works under way now on Government Street, that their roots interfered with gas or water pipes. Perhaps one of the present-day inhabitants is allergic to that yellow pollen in which in the Spring, before the new leaves come out (deciduous, yes, never naked but in the Spring shedding old leaves and blooming abundant yellow) it abounds. Mercifully, I am not allergic to all this blooming (the tallow tree does its own, too), but many people suffer acutely for a couple of weeks.
Even today, two days later, the base of the stump of the righthand tree remains. In January of 1912 I had noticed that after rain the knob of a root that persisted in growing right over the curb and into the gutter, which had been trimmed back repeatedly, had somehow the aspect of a gnome with a gnarled, snarling face. It took my fancy, and I used it as the headpiece of a blot post. It also is in the Picasa album (now also in +Google, slokind), with references to other photographs taken at the base of the tree.
I wish I were a better botanist!
