After settling into our house in January of 2000, the silver maples out front quickly became integral to our idea of home. They were sort of like heirloom furniture–cherished and comfortable, arranged pleasantly in an expansive, open-air room.  No, they were more than that; they were almost like our extended family, part of our beloved community.  My husband attached a rope swing to a branch on one of the trees closest to the house, and it became a favorite spot for our daughter and her friends.  Other trees served as her lookout perches.  The maples were frequent backdrops for Christmas card photos and others of our daughter and dog that I sent to grandparents throughout the year.  The trees have been gracious hosts to our feathered and furry friends.  They’re particularly popular with woodpeckers.  Last fall I watched as two enormous pileated woodpeckers worked their prodigious beaks like jackhammers on opposite sides of an upper branch in one of the trees.  

We knew when we moved in that the old trees were nearing the end of their life span.  Silver maples aren’t  like oaks that can endure for centuries.  We tried to keep them trimmed to enhance their longevity, but our efforts had their limits. 

The tree nearest the street at the center point of our front yard was the first to begin losing some major limbs.  In the above photo from 2010, one of the big branches had recently fallen.  

 

Our house sits on a sharp curve of a narrow road.  The trees along this outer edge are vulnerable to errant vehicles.  We lost count of the number of times that a driver misjudged the curve or lost traction after a rain and collided with the tree above.  As limbs fell or were removed, it became the  stump that we decorated each year for Christmas.   The protective bulk that remained continued to be a useful block for our yard, so we allowed it to diminish and decay naturally.  Even in its last gasps, the tree, paradoxically,  was full of life.  Its final remains became a  hub of fantastical lichen growth.  

The tree toward the center of the photo above became a home for a family of barred owls in the spring of 2004.  I remember standing on the front porch with my father as we spotted a big, beautiful owl soaring toward the tree.  Its wingspan was immense.  Amazingly, the bird disappeared into a cavity high atop the tree.  A bit later it emerged, flew away, and returned to repeat the process.  I was peering through binoculars when I saw a huge eye staring back at me from inside the tree, right after the owl had departed.  We gaped in awe as a second large owl emerged.  Wow!  Both parents were coming and going, we realized.  Often, one owl  would keep vigil on a branch near the nest.  Slightly smaller than the other, we presumed her to be the female.  Exuding gravitas, she eyed our family with cool confidence.  Did we imagine that she was sizing up our small daughter, who would start kindergarten in the fall, as potential prey?  Could she manage a catch of that size?  We doubted it, but we didn’t let D go out in the yard alone.  While the mother guarded the nest, the male typically remained within eyesight, watching from a more secluded post.  

After a while, we began to catch glimpses of their young.  Two pale, fluffy heads began to peek out from the cavity.  Then we started to see the mother owl disappear inside the tree and pop back out nearly immediately.  She did this over and over.  Next she’d sit on a nearby branch and gaze intently at the nest.  Soon, we’d see an owlet emerging, tentatively, from inside the tree.  The mother, it seemed, was encouraging her young to venture out, to give their wings a try.  How scary that thought must be for a young bird!  After a while, the female appeared to dive emphatically into the tree cavity, as though she were losing patience.  “Come on!,” her body language said.  “You can do it!  Trust me!”  

We didn’t witness the owlets’ first actual flight, but I saw proof of their new-found ability.  One morning I was out in the yard shortly after dawn, when I saw the two owlets outside the nest.  Their fuzzy, pearl-gray bodies were draped, liked minimally stuffed dog toys (or those melting Dali clocks!) over the branch of a nearby tree, just above my head.  Their eyes were closed.  I remember gasping audibly, because I thought they were dead.  I waited in trepidation, hoping for signs of life.  Just when I was about to assume the worst, the owlets began to stir.  Their big, dark eyes opened.  They groggily roused themselves and gradually summoned the energy to sit up.  Whew!  They’d survived what must have been an exhausting first night of flight.  We saw the young ones flying short distances a couple of times.  And soon afterwards, the whole family was gone.  

When the natural shelf for the nest collapsed the next year, my husband and daughter worked together to build an owl box, seen above and below, and attached it to the tree.  When the owls failed to return to the box in its initial placement, my husband positioned it much higher up on the limb, as seen below.  Over the years, we often hear the distinctive cries of barred owls in our neighborhood:  Hoo hoo hoo hoo!  Who Cooks for You?  But never again have they nested in one of our trees.  

We were eating Easter dinner on the back porch on a quiet, perfectly still afternoon in April 2011 when we heard a thunderous crash.  We rushed to the front yard to discover, with dismay, that half of the owl tree had fallen heavily to the ground.  Sadly, we had no choice but to have the remaining, unstable portion removed. Like the owl family, the owl tree left us suddenly and too soon.  

 

The spring of the owls coincided with peak season for the seventeen-year cicadas.  Our maples, we discovered, are choice cicada territory.  Our yard was abuzz with the lumbering, clumsy creatures, and the maple trunks were studded with a multitude of tan exoskeletons.  Our daughter, ever a fan of nature in all her odd manifestations, found the cicadas charming.  The owls evidently shared her appreciation, or at least they recognized in the slow-moving insects an easy food source for themselves and their young.  

For the past ten years or so, only the two maples closest to the house have remained.  Their long branches created the leafy frame through which I will always imagine our home.  On snowy, moonlit nights, the shadows cast by the trees were magical.  

As of this month, the maple frame is lopsided.  In mid-July, we experienced the start of the series of unfortunate weather events that would lead to the fall and removal of one of the long-lived pair.  The last surviving maple, we’re told, has exceeded its life span.  Likely, it’s not long for this world.  Much as when a well-loved family member lives to a ripe old age, we’ll try to be grateful for the many good years we shared.      

 

 

It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1999 when we first saw the house that would become our home.  We’d moved to Northern Virginia from New Jersey the year before, and we were renting a small townhouse near my husband’s office.  Our daughter was eleven months old.  We’d gotten the hang of packing her into her car seat and settling her in her stroller, and she was typically a happy short-distance traveler.  Our primary weekend activity had become house hunting.  House looking, really, because we weren’t yet prepared to buy.  It was free, entertaining, it got us out of our increasingly cramped space, and it was a good way to get to know the area.  Most homes were well beyond our means, but we looked at everything we found vaguely appealing; we wanted to get a feel for the wide scope of the market.  At an open house that fall we met a realtor with whom we felt an immediate rapport.  We appreciated her humorous quips, made all the more amusing when delivered in her posh British accent.  She won me over completely when she referred to our daughter as that “ex-quisite child.”  (Dawn Jones is savvy.)  She was determined to take us under her wing.  We told her we weren’t sure how serious we were about buying.  Nevertheless, she persisted.  

Buying a home was a very big deal for us.  We were used to university housing and eccentric rental spaces.  As a grad student, I lucked into a cushy house-sitting job on lovely Battle Road for a Princeton professor.  I even managed to get my husband-to-be a similar gig in another beautiful home right across the street.  We relished being mortgage-free high-end real estate dwellers.  And then we began our married life at the other end of the spectrum,  in Princeton’s bare bones and now-demolished Butler Apartments, built in the 1940s as temporary quarters for returning GIs.  We’d never had a place that we could truly call our own.   

We’d seen several homes with Dawn when I found an online listing that seemed promising, if oddly worded and rather puzzling.  The internet was fairly new back then, and I was proud of myself for using it to browse local real estate listings.  The photo showed what appeared to be a sizable white house, far bigger than we expected to afford.  But surprisingly, it was in our price range.  The description read as follows:  This is a lovely home that can also be remodeled.  The garage can be fixed.  Painting done, finish the basement with bedroom and full buth (sic), price would be $150,000 more.  It had been on the market for months.  Worth a look, we thought, but there must be something seriously wrong with the place.  

We anticipated disappointment as we went to meet Dawn at the address.  We expected to find a dilapidated shell, an extreme fixer-upper in need of a daunting amount of work.  What we saw was a plain, unassuming American Foursquare farmhouse with a central block and two symmetrical wings.  Aluminum siding on the outside.  Inside decor featured mid-1970s stalwarts like orange shag carpeting in every upstairs bedroom and faux French provincial white and gold detailing in the bathrooms.  In the kitchen, there was a sort of fake shake roof thing that extended the full length of two walls.  The former owner had been a heavy smoker, and the copious wallpaper, thick carpeting, heavy draperies and all the woodwork were yellowed with nicotine.  Structurally, the house appeared to be sound.  It was spacious, and we loved the floor plan, with a central hall surrounded by four large rooms on each level.  In short, it seemed to be a good, solid house with unfortunate surface treatments.  Familiar territory, for me, from my childhood home in Atlanta.  We could make this old house our own.  

And then, there were the trees.  

The photo from the real estate listing showed parts of two big trees that appeared to frame the house.  Turns out they were silver maples, much like those outside my grandparents’ farmhouse, the beloved central focus of my childhood.  Lots of people dislike these trees.  They grow quickly but tend to shed their bulky limbs regularly.  Their knobby roots, spreading far and wide, are the enemy of a pristine lawn.  But I was delighted to see that a semi-circle of six grand old maples sheltered the front yard.  As I wrote in a post from 2012, those trees spoke to me.  They said, “You’re home!”  

The house dates from 1920, and the trees are of the same vintage.  Not long after we moved in, church friends helped me contact a woman whose family had built the house.  In her 90s at the time, and living in southern Virginia, she spoke with great fondness about her childhood home.  Back then, it was on two hundred acres, on which they raised wheat.  When I mentioned how much I loved the big maples, she told me that as a very little girl, she had helped her parents plant them “from switches!”  

Since settling in, in January of 2000,  we’ve described our home as the old white farmhouse with the old trees in front.    

That description is less accurate as of this summer.  Due to recent weather events, only one maple remains.