Farewell to our beautiful red maple that has graced the corner of Ferry Road and Lyme street for so many years.
Here is an excert from the sermon on July 20th given by Rev. Laura Fitzpatrick-Nager:
“Poems of Praise: On Trees, Treasures and Other Timely Gifts”
“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth
is prest Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast; A tree that looks at
God all day, and lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me,
but only God can make a tree.”
Joyce Kilmer (1886 – 1918)
I woke up with that poem by Joyce Kilmer in my heart the other morning. It was last Thursday; the day Jason Wilcox and his crew took down the magnificent red maple that graced our front church lawn for decades. A safety hazard, it had to be cut down. But not without leaving some grief in its wake. Now, every time I pass by our church, I see emptiness where the maple used to be…what’s left is only the eyesore of the light pole standing naked all by its lonesome.
It’s good to miss a tree of such beauty. And appreciate the rooted life it has held in our midst. Given the uncertain, precarious and hostile time we’re living in right now, losing this tree feels…personal.
I learned from our church historian that the maple was more than likely planted around 1935 after the Dutch Elm disease decimated earlier trees. In its 90 plus years of life, we’ve received so many gifts from its presence, from beauty through the changing seasons to decades of nesting birds to dappled sunlight and coolness shining through its shady boughs.
That towering tree has seen us through a lot of living. When it was a young sapling in the 30’s , there would have been the new minister, Rev Dick Hoag and his wife, Harriet, walking by it on their way to their home at the parsonage, where Steve, Rachael and their family live now. It was the Great Depression, and then the hurricane of ‘38, the New Deal would have been implemented and the era of Hitler and Fascism on the rise. As our Giving Tree grew it would have seen more change, more storms, more seasons, more wars, more births and deaths, more White Elephant Sales and hotter summers, too many epidemics from the AIDS crisis to racism and a pandemic, all from the vantage point of growing inch by inch year by year right here on the corner of Lyme and Ferry Road.
The longevity of this Giving Tree’s presence is no small thing. It has weathered so much. If we’re lucky enough to make it to our 90’s, to be nonagenarians like our tree was, that longevity is a communal gift … .as are some of those wisdom figures sitting here in our congregation this morning!
Our beautiful church is one of the most frequently photographed and painted Congregational churches in New England. And over the past 90 plus years, I imagine those paintings and images often include our tree. I hope it lives on not only in memory and images but in other ways, too. I heard that a talented woodworker in our church may make a bowl or two from the treasured maple wood so it will live on in beauty…
The author, Richard Powers, in his epic novel, The Overstory, wrote,
“My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree,
what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.