David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Not Just Any Day at the Beech

Call it the social register tree!  Something about the smooth, smoke gray bark of a beech seems to present a blank page to the human eye, motivates the hand to grab a sharp tool and begin carving.  It’s hard to find one of any size in a well visited place that doesn’t have at least a few letters incised in its skin.  Large beeches absent human inscription are usually found deep in the woods or in a well guarded yard.  It’s not just that the fine bark cuts easily, but the resultant callus formed by the tree to compartmentalize the wound enables the writing to stay for decades.

My first stop on a recent tour of state champion beech trees not far from my Connecticut home found me in Hartford’s Cedar Hill Cemetery where such luminaries as J.P. Morgan, Katherine Hepburn and Wallace Stevens are buried.  Along the main entrance road opposite a pond and just before the flagpole I stopped at the base of the state’s largest rivers purple beech, a tree distinguished for its deep purple spring foliage.  With a columnar trunk, it stands ninety-one feet tall and is a robust 129 inches in diameter at breast height.  Its gray bark is wrinkled in places like elephant skin.  A variety of letters and symbols, including obligatory hearts, were carved on it, though none recently.  With the distortions of time and tree growth they have become bloated and malformed, some taking on the appearance of hieroglyphics.  Moss had collected in a few of the carvings providing distinctive relief and fuzzy color that made them appear even more ancient.  The tree’s tattoos included initials, names, dates, numbers, geometric designs, and phrases cut in a variety of styles and depths.

Fiddling for a Spring Meal

They’re delicious and free for the picking!  Before the oaks and maples leaf out in early spring, tasty fiddleheads are pushing through the bronze leaf litter in moist woodlands throughout New England.  Perhaps no native wild food grows so plentifully so close to so many and yet is on the dinner plates of so few.  They  sprout beside roads and riverbanks, in forested glades and vacant lots.

Fiddleheads are the tightly coiled fronds of ferns that have not fully leafed out.  The curled leaves resemble the scroll of a violin.  Prized by gourmets, country folk and foragers, they are the Stradivarius of spring vegetables.  Ostrich ferns supply edible fiddleheads in my neck of the woods, but despite the name, they are neither exotic nor imported.  Rather, the mature dark green fronds are said to look like ostrich plumes.

Taking a Stand on Chairs

One of the joys of coffee or a sandwich in the cozy confines of LaSalle Market on Collinsville’s Main Street is the eclectic collection of chairs clustered at the many wooden tables.  Customers sit in bow-back arm chairs, delicate bentwood and sturdy Mission designs, high-back dining room styles, stools of tubular metal, faux Windsors with delicate spindles, and modern types with fabric seats.  Some look like they came straight from mom’s kitchen or a college dorm.  I’ve counted at least a dozen different types.

Perhaps their variety helps draw the wonderfully eclectic clientele.  “A setting that is full of chairs, all slightly different, immediately creates an atmosphere which supports rich experience,” wrote architecture professor Christopher Alexander.  Chairs are an invitation.  They make us feel welcome.  Even the prickly Thoreau found space in his tiny Walden Pond hut for chairs—“one for solitude, two for friendship; three for society.”