Trees In My Life

By Jerome Francis Lusa

This short memoir is a homage to the trees that I have touched and that have sustained me. Please don't call me a tree hugger, though. Yes, I have hugged trees, but it was for my sake, not theirs, and that makes all the difference. I love trees in the way that Pan troglodytes loves trees, for we have lived in them and they have sustained us. For my part, I have also cut them down, burned their logs to stay warm in winter and created things from their wood. Indeed, trees have truly sustained me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jerome Francis Lusa
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301985180

Jerome Francis Lusa

Jerome Francis Lusa has been dabbling in writing since attending the University of Connecticut in the late 1970's. Jerome's professional career has been writing computer software systems for many businesses throughout the State of Connecticut. His numerous letters to newspaper editors have appeared in The Hartford Courant and the Glastonbury Citizen. Now that his children are grown, he has started publishing his older stories and writing new ones, all as ebooks. Jerome publishes stories under his own name, and also as his alter ego, Lorem J Fause. The themes of his stories vary from a deer's stream of consciousness, to courage, bereavement, and several stops in between. Jerome sketches the covers and artwork for his stories. In his youth, writing was a way to explore ideas. Lately it has become a way to cleanse his demons.

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Trees In My Life

Copyright (C) 2013 by Jerome Francis Lusa

Cover Photo by Jerome Francis Lusa

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Preface

By the Author

This short memoir is a homage to the trees that I have touched and that have sustained me. Please don’t call me a tree hugger, though. Yes, I have hugged trees, but it was for my sake, not theirs, and that makes all the difference. I love trees in the way that Pan troglodytes loves trees, for we have lived in them and they have sustained us. For my part, I have also cut them down, burned their logs to stay warm in winter and created things from their wood. Indeed, trees have truly sustained me.

I am indebted to my wife Gayle, my daughter Amanda and my good friend Lynn Chirico for reviewing these stories and for their honest advice. Thank you all.

Jerome Francis Lusa

2013

Table of Contents

My First Play Tree

Lemon Tree, Very Pretty, And… Off Limits!

A Stand of Lilacs

A Grotto In A Crab Apple Grove

A Climbing Tree

Pines Near The Crab Apple Grove

Boys in Big Pines

Lofty Ambitions

More History Than Most

Family Tree

Sacrificial Limbs

Where Hawk’s Dare

Extracurricular Activity

A Lean and Mean Pine Tree

A Meditating Tree

New House, Old Tree

I, Logger

Turn Left At The Fork In The Tree

Among Giants

Living In The Woods

The $50 Dare

Owl Hotel

A Cyclist’s Reprieve

Mid-Autumn Devastation

Thoughts About Urban Trees

Epilogue

My First Play Tree

A small wild cherry tree has staked a tenuous foothold aside the capstone of an abandoned well. It leans away from the well and over the edge of a small swampy patch in the otherwise urban backyard. A few feet up from its base, the little tree forks into two main branches that splay apart to form a Y, each branch hardly an inch thick. The branches are just high enough for a four or five-year-old child to reach. That’s me, or perhaps my brother, with one foot wedged in the fork and holding onto each branch with one hand. We are shaking the tree madly, trying to loosen the sour inedible berries that have ripened in the summer heat. There are several things that a young boy can do with wild black cherries, but all of them involve an adult later washing the deep red stain from their cloths.

This was our first play tree. It was all of ten feet tall measured along its slanting axis. We didn’t as much climb it as step up into it. From our perch of all of two or three feet, there was little we could do other than shake the tree, thanks to the convenient handles of two forking branches, but even that posed a hazard. If, in our zeal to wag the tree, we overshot our forward momentum and lost our grip, we were destined for a headlong fall into the murky swamp below, and another load of dirty laundry for mom.

We also climbed the little cherry tree to spy on wildlife from its vantage point over the swamp. Suburbanites through and through, we were loath to wade in the swamp for all the monsters that lurked in its waters: frogs, snakes and bugs! So