BEHIND THE SCENES:
ABOUT THE TREES
Thanksgiving 2021

Something to be grateful for, I can leave my office in Paris and fifteen hours later pull up the drive to my mother’s house. You might take this for granted as I have for all the years I have lived on this side of the ocean. It was no big deal to fly around, just time and money. Like taking the bus, I was known to say because I spent so much time in the air. 

Since Covid I think differently. The sky driving between Newark and Philadelphia never looked so blue, clouds hanging like backlit Boucher above the scrubby landscape of turnpikes. Four days to see my three younger brothers, their families and my mom. Thanksgiving. Fifteen of us ages 8 months to 90. Blessings. Rapture. Craziness as usual. 

The trees were still protecting the house, hovering like giants every decade. The house was built and first landscaped in 1929, old trees planted well before, do still tower and sway in the high winds. Climate crisis afflicts them. 

Jet lag sent me out at dawn to see what had happened since my last visit.  They stood firm as we held our collective breaths; mom looks out during powerful storms hoping another one doesn’t pull up from the roots and crash down. But it happens. Even they have their limits. 

When we moved into this house, I was 11; there was a rose garden and banks of rhododendrons and azaleas throughout the woodlands. There was a beautiful flowering dogwood tree, long gone just next to the sun porch, and a tall pine just outside my bedroom allowed squirrels to look in when I did my homework. Cut down many years ago, my view is now deep into woods, the middle distance.

“What are you thankful for,” one young nephew asked as we sat down to our turkey. Everyone looked across the table and then one by one replies began. That we managed to be safe in the wake of Covid. That we were all together; and had each other after a long two years amongst the trees rooted and alive, growing still. I was grateful for each one of them.

All photos by JSVCprojects