Is it disheartening to post about travel when we are prohibited? Or might it be an escape? I’m not sure, but it somehow doesn’t feel right just now. I think I’ll continue with a subject from Friday: trees. And this will be about my close friends. Not that these are especially dear to me, just nearby—quite literally at the end of the block. And survivors of disease.
Ulmus Americana
Around a century ago in Europe, a fungus from Asia arrived, likely by beetles on a ship. A scientist in the Netherlands identified the disease in 1921, and so it is now called Dutch Elm Disease. The tree’s effort to block the spread of the fungus is to fatally plug it’s own system of delivering water and nutrients.
The disease soon arrived by ship in New York City. Quarantine and sanitation practices limited it’s spread until World War II when other demands relaxed the containment efforts, and the disease spread throughout the country.
I live in town named after the Elm tree. My street was canopied with elms when we moved in. The numbers have dwindled, but I can still look out the kitchen window as I type this and see the playful branches of one across the street silhouetted against the gray sky. This one can look down the block across the tops of all the newer trees who have replaced the lost relatives, to the two my neighbor Mike cares for in his yard. He watchfully cares for them, and inoculates them in the spring giving them a chance to survive. One is pictured above, and the other will be below.
From 1919 until 1928, Carl Sandburg lived in town. He published Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years, several children’s books, and volumes of poetry while living here. He commuted to his job at the Chicago Daily News. The Chicago, Aurora, and Elgin Electric line that then had two stops in town, was later abandoned. In the 1960s it became one of the first unused rail lines to be converted to a public path. A freight line, a couple hundred feet north had also been abandoned, and in that narrow corridor between the lines, a treasure had been left. Although nicknamed The Prairie State, nearly all of Illinois’ original prairie was plowed over for farming or development. Between the tracks was an original bit of prairie, and the trail is named The Prairie Path.
Prairie Path
Yesterday morning, a spring snow covered the trees and the grasses. A few like us escaped their isolation for bit to enjoy this beauty along the path. On our return home, we were greeted by Mike and Mary’s elms which will soon be showing their buds. I believe those two elms’s branches and roots reach out to each other, and share a very long conversation. Perhaps, Carl Sandburg’s memory held scenes of riding down the rail line or walking the streets of town some March when he wrote Elm Buds.
Elm buds are out.
Yesterday morning, last night,
they crept out.
They are the mice of early
spring air.
To the north is the gray sky.
Winter hung it gray for the gray
elm to stand dark against.
Now the branches all end with the
yellow and gold mice of early
spring air.
They are moving mice creeping out
with leaf and leaf.
-Carl Sandburg
(Source: Honey and Salt, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963)
Gray for gray