Childhood memories of the Maple Tree

I have no memory of when the Maple was planted and vague memories of it growing to its majestic height. One of the vague memories that surfaced is of Dad staking the tree when it was in it’s infancy to help it to grow straight and tall. We children grew up with this tree, each of us growing in stature as the years went by. Soon the tree outstripped our upward growth by leaps and bounds, we stopped growing taller, not so this wonderful tree. It reached for the sky as its limbs grew outwards each year adding inches and then feet to its girth. What started out, as a quick raking of its leaves in the fall became a daunting task for the unlucky one chosen to clean the lawn in the fall of the year. The burning of the leaves in the steel barrel in the early years sent a tiny plume of smoke skyward as the years went by this simple task also multiplied by the shear volume of the leaves that needed to be disposed of. No longer a small plume of smoke broke the stillness of the night air, now great volumes of black smoke came forth from the mouth of the barrel, a barrel that had outgrown this fall ritual.

When we young children first attacked the Maple with our climbing feats we found easy access to the branches from the ground but by the time the youngest of my siblings was old enough to try the climb there were no longer branches that could be reached by just standing on the lawn under the tree. A ladder was now needed to lean against the tree trunk so that the brave one could reach the first branches that were many feet in the air to start their ascent to the upper most reaches of the tree.

The tree was not only a playground for us McEachern children; as the years went by it became the main focal point of our social gatherings as a family. In the early years when we gathered around the tree in our lawn chairs the sun’s intense heat was barely diminished by the sparse leaves that grew overhead. By the time that my parents moved from the property where that tree stood, we, all of our relatives and most of the neighborhood was easily protected from the suns rays by the huge canopy of leaves that stretched out ten feet in every direction from the core of the tree. Majestic is a minimalist verb to describe how the tree looked in its full summer foliage.