Meet My Oak Tree Friend
Shaking hands with the old being in the backyard.
It took decades for this oak tree to extend its hand-shaped leaves low enough for us to touch – at first we could only reach them if there was an unseasonable snowstorm in October while the leaves were still on the tree, but in the years since we went from jumping up to high-five them to now just shaking hands whenever we wish to.
This is an old tree, a champion white oak tree if I were the one giving out the awards. It doesn’t belong to us but it has sheltered us, shaded us, lured wildlife for us to observe, given us a beautiful view and acorns to collect, leaves to rake. It’s been a neighbor, a stress-reducer, a teacher, a being that has seen a great many seasons and people come and go. I know its shape, the grain of its bark, the color of its leaves in early spring, midsummer and autumn, the color the trunk turns after a heavy rain, the way snow highlights its branches in winter.
Its roots run beneath our lawn and its branches soar above it, hugging our outdoor experience. As a child I played in its early spring shadows, a pulmonary like network of shadow rivers slicing through the sunlit grass. As an adult I have navigated my binoculars through its branches to identify warblers, orioles and woodpeckers.
This tree also attended our wedding.
The wind going through its leaves is loud enough to drown out the noise of a distant lawnmower but when a storm comes, look out! It is obviously strong as oak but uses these storms as an opportunity to shed dead branches, letting go of that which no longer serves it. We find the discards covered in lichen and fungus, already on their way to compost.
Who planted this white oak? A squirrel? A person? What did it look like 100 years ago? 150 years ago? 200 years ago? How much longer will it tower over this backyard, and does it know how much I will miss it when we move away?
Who will become my new tree friend when we move into our new home?
ART DROP #14
For this month’s art drop, I’ve decided that this oak tree, unremarkable to most people but dear to me and those who know it, deserves to be celebrated and elevated and remembered. I feel a profound grief leaving it even though I will be visiting regularly. Maybe this art drop is just for me, so I can at least look at a photograph of it on the wall of my new house every day, even if I can no longer see it from my window.
White Oak Tree Friend
Tenafly, New Jersey, USA
by Diana Pappas
Prints of this photograph are only available through July 7, 2024 [correction: now open until July 13], with no further production of this work for at least a year. To learn more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.
Thank you for spending time with us and the white oak tree! We’ll be back next week to close the art drop, and perhaps share some other photographs of this amazing tree that we’ve made over the years. This newsletter is being sent out from New Jersey, but the next one will most definitely be sent out from our new home in Massachusetts. The adventure begins…
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That's one beautiful old tree. We have a mixture of red and white oaks interspersed with sugar maples. All youngsters now at about half a century but already towering over our driveway. They are all friends and I love them dearly. I remember crying during an ice storm one year, when all around were the sounds of breaking branches. Mostly these were white birches snapping in half, but the oaks were forever changed that day too. What a privilege it is to live long enough in one place to know the life of a tree. Thank you for your essay. A lucky tree to have you as a friend.
I love this elegy to your elder companion. We have some smaller and younger fruit trees that we consider elders in our yard. Fruit trees don’t usually get to the generation spanning ages of great oaks but they still hold that longer connection to a place than we can. Beautiful words and image for a good friend.