Symmetry & Succession

Every Monday afternoon my daughter comes home from school with a new book. Her homework is to read aloud to her Dad or me for fifteen minutes. Monday and Tuesday nights this week I had meetings. So on Wednesday night, I dropped into How the Forest Grew mid-stream.  Apparently on Monday night, a family moved away from its farm, leaving the fields untended. By Tuesday night, rabbits and grouse had moved into the tall grasses. Seeds from nearby trees had begun to take root.

On Wednesday night, a drawing showed white pine saplings springing up in the fields. These forest “pioneers,” my daughter informed me, were the first in a succession of trees and creatures that would lead to a mature forest. The pines looked just like those my husband coincidentally photographed with his phone last Sunday at my late grandmother Nanny’s homeplace in North Carolina. He was in the area for the first time in years to see a friend who had flown in for a basketball game. On my husband’s way to the stadium, he took a brief detour on “55 Highway” to visit Nanny’s land.

Little is left of the house and gardens my siblings and I knew during our childhood summers there. Nanny died in 2002. Two years later, her one-story farmhouse was mortally wounded and condemned due to a fire started by tenants. A few months later, a local fire department finished the job in a training drill. The brick chimney remains, along with the stone steps that led to the front porch.

For now, Nanny’s property sits in limbo. The local government changed the parcel’s zoning designation from farm/residential to commercial in the 1980s. No home can be built there again. Highway interchanges are under construction just two miles up the road. New subdivisions nearby have names like “Ashleigh Woods.” My family struggles to imagine the best next use of the land.  A bike shop for the nearby trails? A bank? While we ruminate, the white pines have marched in. They make no distinction between the inside and outside of Nanny’s house. That’s a boundary that exists only in memory now. My daughter assures me that the trees are doing their job: paving the way for the red oak, red maple, magpie, and crow.

Nanny's land with chimney at left.