285. It's a sign

We no longer live between the sycamores. The forestry department came out on Monday. The sycamore closest to Grand was dying and obviously on some sort of to-do list. The street was filled with orange trucks and tree-grabbers and mulchers and all that. Busy morning with the end of the street blocked and it's gone.

When we moved in, there were two sycamores down by Grand, one in the middle of the street, and one at the top corner. All the corner ones are gone now, leaving just this ancient tree in the center of the street, the tallest oldest tree on the block. Its days are numbered and I fear it will be replaced by some bozo tree like a bradford pear or flowering plum or something else ridiculous. We don't have wires in the front of our houses. We should have substantial trees. I know they are a risk in the ice storms and spring thunderstorms we get in the midwest, but they're worth it.

My house is now the most shaded on the north side of the block, with our black oak and sweetgum. They're both younger and healthier than the sycamores, but who knows? Neighbors to the east of us lost 3 American Basswoods in one year. How long until we're debating between zelkovas and oaks?

But I take this as a sign. I haven't been over here much in the past 6 months and it's time to integrate this into South City Musings. I use the same pseudonyms anyway. Gretchen and Zelda and Valerie live over there, too. So there you go. Because it's not going anywhere.

262/365 Suddenly the tallest tree

Suddenly I have the tallest tree on the alley. Maybe not quite--there's a black walnut two houses up that is pretty tall. But this red-silver hybrid maple is close. I love this tree. But it is too tall. Too tall to live with the wires. Ah well. Life is full of risk.

260/265 Woodpile

The King and Queen of Unfinished Projects.

When I said this to Zelda and Travis, he shook his head and said that must make them Prince and Princess. This made me laugh a long time as I thought about it.

This is our mulberry tree. It sat in the middle of our parking pad. For a year. I stacked it by myself along the side of the parking pad. It took a little over an hour. I am such a loser. Why did I wait? Because that's just who I am. That's me all over.

254/365 Sweet Gum Ball

For my non-midwesterners. Sweetgum trees personified. First, some stock photos.

Sweetgums are gorgeous fall color trees. Bright orange, yellow, purple, red, all on the same tree. The ones in Tower Grove, easily over 100 years old, are on fire every fall. Breathtaking.
Pretty star shaped leaves that have multiple colors. They have a spicy, pleasant smell when torn or crushed. I love the sweetgum outside my front walk--it's a street tree and it shades my front yard. Pretty and big and healthy.

But this is the seed pod it drops. And it drops them, not all at once, not all in a few weeks' time, but constantly:


And this is how things look pretty much all the time if you have a sweetgum tree nearby:Ok, not always that bad, but rake them a bit and you have a huge pile of these sweetgum balls, these absolutely useless pointy hard round things. Step on them, and they slip beneath your feet, making you prone to fall. If you're barefoot, well, you slip and your heel hurts from the points.

So they are everywhere. They get ground down into the yard so they are hard to rake out. They easily germinate, too, so I have all these annoying baby sweetgums all over my planting beds in front. And the sidewalks, as you can see below, become treacherous. This isn't my sweetgum, but Gretchen's--mine is bigger and even more prolific.
But I still love them, even with their flaws. Not every tree can be an ash or a hard maple.

221/365 Dead Trees

My sister Bevin refuses to believe that trees die. Trees can be KILLED, of course, by lumberjacks and utility companies and ice storms. And trees can get sick and die from bugs and fungi and whatever else creeps in to kill them. But trees do not, all by themselves, die.

They do, though, and the sycamores on my block are demonstrating, daily, seasonally, how trees die. They usually do not die gracefully, for instance. Valerie, Zelda, and I were sitting out last week when it was so pretty and watched a limb, like, the thickness of two baseball bats, drop from the sycamore closest to Grand and just land in the front yard of one of our invisible neighbors. Kaboom. Up on the other end of the block, the sycamore is in distress. The utility company came through last week and removed a bunch of branches, really hacked away, but didn't take it down. Not their job. So asinine.

It made me glad for my oak and sweetgum.

Zelda has a dead tree in front of her house, too, a young maple (I think) that didn't make it through last winter. It had some stress shoots last spring, but they didn't last. The tree is now dead. Doornail dead. It has a shelf fungus growing on it. It is now an ecosystem. I'm sure they will plant again soon and all will be well. Plus, in the winter it looks like all the others.

(Note: I don't care about the dead tree. Really. I think it's funny because it obstinately stands there, dead, but it doesn't bother me a whit).

219/365 Gum

Travis sat on the steps next to Zelda. I was in front of them, half the time looking over my shoulder to chat and half the time watching Billy run run run.

He reported his findings on gum base. Cost, which purveyor, amounts. Gum base, I thought to myself. Gum base. I thought about printmaking class and gum arabic. What was he planning to make?

Zelda explained before I asked. Travis makes his own beer. He also knows how to roast coffee. He recently made root beer. And now? Chewing gum. Zelda wasn't so sure. Gum base? It sounded like a kit, like something a novice, a gum fancier, would get, not for someone who really wanted to learn how.

But Travis thought it would be fun to play with. Plus, you really can't make it yourself, he pointed out.

Pause. At the very same moment his eyes and mine both landed on my street tree, my sweetgum, my Liquidambar styraciflua.

"You could," I point at it.

"We could tap Bridgett's tree!" Zelda exclaims.

187/365 Chimneys

They're useless, you know. Each of our houses has three, at least, some have four. I have two that have fireplaces attached, and a third that must have had something to do with the kitchen originally but now is just a vestigial ornament, like the appendix. They do me no good. They are unlined, or lined with ceramic tile (the house is 1905 so ceramic tile, I read, was en vogue to line chimneys by that time, but who knows?). So I can't light a fire in them. Wait. I can light one fire. But never a second because my house will probably burn down.

If we ever wanted to light a fire, we'd have to get the chimneys lined and in one case, probably rebuilt, at least part of it. We could do a ventless gas insert, but that's not why I want a fireplace. I am not at a stage in my life where I can sit in the big leather chair and stare at a fire, real or gas or whatever. I want a working chimney to have a backup heat source, like a wood stove insert or standing wood stove. I have fear of being without electricity for 5 days in the wintertime and having to expend a great amount of cash or effort to find a hotel or a relative's house where we can stay. I'd rather stay in my own house, and knowing what my friend Astrid went through in the winter of 2006 when that very scenario occurred, well, I'd rather be prepared.

It would only be one chimney, probably the one in the dining room because that room doesn't have a mantel and is the most centrally located of the chimneys. It runs past our room, too (we have a foursquare house, which is like a child-designed floorplan of four rooms on the first floor, four rooms on the second, triangle shaped attic on top). I don't want it to replace our nicely efficient lovely new HVAC system. I just want it for when we need it (or when we want it, frankly). Living in the city means wood is not easy to come by for free, it's not like we have a back lot of 100 acres to thin out. But we do have a giant mulberry tree's worth of logs well-seasoned in back, and there's always some tree coming down.

I want to do it. But it's not cheap. And there are other things on my list, like a first floor bathroom that doesn't suck, or the Great Separation of the attic into smaller bedrooms. And the front porch (sigh) needs to be on the list. But this? This is taking a spot in the top 5 big projects. It's not smart to put it off, I have a hunch.

186/365 Sycamore Winter

185/365 Street Tree

This is the trunk of my favorite street tree, a black oak that technically sits just over my western property line on Big Ed's lot. It spreads out beautifully above, not a typical oak shape as I think of them. Acorns are big, stain the sidewalk.

Trees, for the most part, aren't suited for tree lawn life. This one hasn't compromised its principles. It folds over the curb, roots making pockets that are deep enough to fish in--if you want to catch mosquito larvae. I'm going to probably fill them with dirt and plant some innocuous. But who am I kidding? This tree is Fairy House Central. I'm not wasting my time for it to be dug up and presented as offerings to our tiny invisible neighbors.

178/365 Zelkova

It's a pretty little tree, the replacement for the American Elm. It gets the same vase-shape to its branches. The Paxtons planted it when their maple died suddenly one summer. Here it is in the snow.

164/365 Holodno

It's cold now. Flurries last night. Highs in the 30s and 40s all week. It seems like just last week...indeed, it was. Sunday before Thanksgiving was 75. I'm glad we raked leaves when we did, because there's no way I would now.

The juncos are in full force. The various sweetgum trees have popped open their seedpods (the cursed sweetgum balls), coating all surfaces with tiny brown seeds. Juncos eat it up and sit in my magnolia, fat and happy. The mourning doves sit on my porch fluffed up, keeping each other warm. The black Weegie stray with a half a tail is back in the early evenings, hissing at me from under the porch and begging for food. He's so unappealing and yet I've named him Woolly Bear and consider him part of life here between the sycamores.

Billy's in shoes full-time now, when he isn't in sleepers. Fiona has requested more "fleecy" pants for school. Meaning sweatpants. And Daisy dropped the vanity and put on her big brown parka this morning.

Eta holodno, they'd say in Russian. It's cold.

162/365 Leaf Raking From Last Week

161/365 Red

160/365 Tall Thin Tree

114/365 She hasn't changed a bit

35/365 Laundry

Sheets drying in the hot hot breeze. As long as I get them in before the thunderstorm, everything works fine. It's been raining a lot here, and everywhere. But I sneak out and hang things when I can.

I put a line up the first summer we lived here, running from the back porch to the back gate. But it was under a tree and didn't work very well. It came down the third summer and went across the yard, in the sunshine, about 4 feet from the back fence. Two parallel lines, actually, because I had so many diapers to dry.

But it was so far away. About two years ago I took it down and zig-zagged a line from the deck to the Navarros' fence next door. That worked perfectly until the euonymous bush got so tall and wide that it took up too much of the line. Plus I'd need a ladder to affix it to the fence this year. So this year it wanders around the yard, behind the pool, the swingset, across to the porch and fence, looping around trees that weren't even there when I put up the first line.

Living here long enough, and having a fair certainty that I will continue to live here, does a lot of good for my psyche. I know it's silly to relate how I put wash out to dry to how I live, but this trial and error and not just doing it the same way all the time even if that way sucks is a minor note on a page of examples of how stability has made me smarter and more relaxed and better at being who I am.

But now I'm turning this into a post that belongs on another blog. So I'll leave it at that.

33/365 Liquidambar styraciflua

From Wikipedia:
American Sweetgum is a popular ornamental tree, grown for its intense fall colors, but it also has some drawbacks:

* The wood is brittle and the tree drops branches easily in storms.
* The spiked "gumballs" can be unpleasant to walk on (in fact in California they are known as "ankle biters" or "ankle twisters"), and their profusion can leave a lawn lumpy, since the fruit do not decay well, unless removed.
* Branches may have ridges or "wings" that cause more surface area, increasing weight of snow and ice accumulation on the tree.Our sweetgum tree on the tree lawn is a great shade tree, and the spiky balls have never bothered me like they bother some neighbors. In the fall, it does turn bright yellow, orange, red, and purple. It makes me happy.

But it does drop branches, and worse, it produces babies all over my front yard. I will forever be plucking these out of the ground.

5/365 Sycamore

The sycamore to the east: