Trees

As I bladed along the trail on Christmas Day, the sun's bright light made this white tree glow. Even in its winter dormancy this tree looked quite alive, surrounded by its brown and less spectacular tree brethren.
At home, we have three trees of note: our giant old oak; our Buckeye tree and Albert the blue spruce. Yes, we have names for our trees, and why not? We decided to get Albert to replace a tree that had been in the front yard when we bought the house 5 years ago. It was a nice enough tree, but it dropped red berries all over the front sidewalk and, more to the point, Jim's car. It also had grown so big that it hid the front of the house. So we replaced it with ALbert, who was only about 3 feet tall when planted. This year he has reached the stature that required me to get a ladder to put Christmas lights on the top. (Albert is pictured in a December blog all decked out.)
Jim's sister bought the buckeye tree- named Brutus, of course- for us when we moved in. Brutus is in the back yard and we are waiting for his first buckeye nut.
The grandfather of them all is our oak, the hoary old man with a trunk too big in circumference to wrap my arms around and branches that reach up to heaven, I think. He must be over 100 years old, and I wonder what changes he has seen since he was young. I have come to learn that oaks have cycles and in some years their acorn production is more than others. This year was THE year, because (and I am not kidding) there had to have been tens of thousands of acorns in our back yard. Everywhere you walked, you crunched acorns. The dogs didn't want to go out because it hurt their feet. After trying to rake them, which I realized very quickly was futile, I found the best way to pick them up: a shop vac. I can now say that, yes, I have vaccumed my back yard, not once, but three times. I'm sure the neighbors had fun with that, and I bet there were some squirrels who had been there prior to my clean up and who returned, thinking they would find acorn heaven, but instead, looked around and said, "What the hell??"
I wrote about trees today because my friends, Kurt and Leah (Kurt is the writer of Seeing Small, a blog with fabulous pictures and heart-felt words.) had to cut down a cedar in their yard that had been damaged in a recent wind storm, and they were understandibly sad to have to do that. I love the trees on their property, especially a huge cedar in the side yard. I have very fond memories of just "being" out under that tree. Special times!