We do not know what we do not know ....

What we have here is an unidentified man sort of leaning against a big, old Cottonwood tree, which some argue is more than 100 years old. Since I have not been around nearly that long, I cannot vouch for the claim one way or another. There evidently is a way of learning the age of a tree without cutting it down to count the rings. Someday, maybe, I will be at the right place at the right time to check out the method. To celebrate our tree, we have two video offerings: "Trees," a Joyce Kilmer poem, and a taste of Old Norse mythology called Yggdrasil and Odin.

Flights of fancy & other nonsense ....

This is my mother's pet tree. I suppose I could say it is mine, as well -- although I never realized it at the time. This area once was part of a lakeshore yard in my hometown. My mother grew up in a house which once was only a few paces away, and I spent the first few months of my life there -- although I never realized it at the time.

The tree is a Cottonwood, and first was noted and recorded around the  turn of the 19^th Century into the 20^th. Old codgers claimed to have observed the tree about the time the region was being settled in the 1870s, but since many Cottonwood trees existed in the area not much credence was placed in their "recollections."

Sometime before my first birthday, the house was sold and another purchased for our family conveniently located at the edge of the downtown area. Another family moved into the "lake house." I was inside it a few times when I was a boy, but I did not know of my own history as a resident of the house until I was somewhere around thirty.

I envied my mother for having grown up adjacent to this tree and for having her own private, lakeside, sand beach. I had more-or-less "adopted" the lake when I was a young boy and later could only imagine the times I would have had living on it. Of course, I suppose either the tree or the lake might have killed me, too. We do not know what we do not know ....

When the parents of the family which had replaced my own in the house died, the city purchased the lot from their children and the parcel next to it, tore down the houses and turned the property into a public park and beach. Of course, boylike creature that I am, I remain jealous and envious and feel all the other things I should not about this situation.

Whenever I return to the hometown, which is very seldom, I stop by the old tree and touch it and ask if it remembers me from when I was an infant. So far, the old tree has remained silent. When you live more than a century, I suppose you have encountered too many people to remember them all .... especially long-ago babies who now have become sort of handsome / intelligent / wise / modest / daring young men ....