'Let the Mind Take Its Photograph'

Twenty-one years ago, as the plane descended into Houston, even before we touched down, I shed my first stereotype about the state. I suppose I expected cacti, sand and tumble weeds, based on a steady diet of Western movies since childhood. Instead, the landscape seemed upholstered in greenery. Plenty of concrete, of course, but I didn’t see that until later. Skyscrapers seemed surrounded by forest, like a vision out of a J.G. Ballard novel. Our new house was located in Oak Forest, named for the city's dominant tree – live oak (a tree I knew only from Whitman), water oak, Shumard oak, willow oak, bur oak and a dozen other species.

Missing were the maples, a Northern-dominant tree. Two weeks ago while driving through a park in Cleveland, I saw the leaves on stray maples already turning yellow and orange. Drought, heat and disease can make that happen prematurely. Today is the autumnal equinox but you wouldn’t know it here in Houston. The oaks over the next few months will get a little duller in color, without a mass dropping of leaves. Arboreally speaking, autumn is a dull affair in Texas. I drove past my childhood home in suburban Cleveland. The line of silver maples along the right side of the front yard are long gone. All that remains is a showoff sugar maple, soon to turn gaudily orange and yellow. 

The Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas has a poem titled “A Day in Autumn”:

 

“It will not always be like this,

The air windless, a few last

Leaves adding their decoration

To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs

Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

 

“In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up

From the day’s chores, pause a minute,

Let the mind take its photograph

Of the bright scene, something to wear

Against the heart in the long cold.”

 

“The long cold” and geography, in my case. I’m a thousand miles away from the remembered trees of autumn.