My favorite tree(s) ~ remembered on Arbor Day

Barbara Clark asked on Facebook yesterday:

"Happy Arbor Day! What is your favorite tree?"

My favorite tree varied with where I lived.  I remember the two oak trees growing on opposite sides of the sidewalk when we lived in a duplex.  Gloria, a year older than I was (three years old to my two), had a tree on her side and I had one on my side.  Each had a tiny wall around it, a few inches high.  Gloria and I would circle our trees together, walking precariously on our little walls, balancing by touching our own trees as we went round and round, laughing.

When I was three, we moved into my grandmother's house after she died.  The plum tree beside the driveway became my climbing tree.  I could pluck a plum and eat it there, while it was still warm from the sun.

An elm tree grew beside the street and was visible from my bedroom window at the next place we moved.  It had that distinctive elm tree shape that I remember, though you younger readers may not, since a blight took out the elms all over the country.

My husband and I lived in an apartment, when we first married, and parked our car in the shade of a pecan tree in the back.  People came from all around to pick up the pecans that fell from the large tree, so we didn't get many of them.

At two or three years old, our twin daughters wanted to help us rake up the circle of yellow leaves under the hickory tree in our front yard.  Beautiful leaves on the tree in October and on the ground by Halloween.

We built a house on Signal Mountain — actually, the house is in the town of Walden on Walden's Ridge, but known around Chattanooga as Signal Mountain, for the town that overlooks the Tennessee River.  A dogwood grew beside the driveway and became our climbing tree.

For a year, I lived in Knoxville for my job and left my mother living in the house on Signal Mountain.  In the Fountain City area of Knoxville, we had a beautiful Japanese cherry tree.  We were on the Dogwood Trail, and each year cars would follow the trail painted on the roads.  Though the people were out to see dogwoods, they stopped in droves to photograph the Japanese cherry tree in our yard.

When I moved back home to Signal Mountain, the red-leafed maple tree I had planted by the driveway was bigger and prettier.  I had moved it from an area where gas lines were laid through the neighborhood a few months later, so it was a special tree that wouldn't have lived if I hadn't moved it.

I lived with a tall crepe myrtle tree from 1987 to 2005.  It always made me think of the pair of crepe myrtles my grandmother had planted, on the same lot with that plum tree (above).

We never did positively identify the tree in our teensy-tiny plot of dirt at Windsor Village apartments, but someone called it a lilac.  Here's the base of the tree, which did have white blooms.  I grew a picture-perfect tomato beside this tree.

The neighborhood had lots of magnolias, and one was in the yard of the house next to mine in St. Elmo.  Its limbs draped over part of my yard, and it was beautiful.

And now, in my latest apartment complex, I have this ornamental cherry tree that I showed you in March (spring has sprung) and early April (feeling foolish).  This is my tree photo; I googled to find the others.

Summary (for myself)

oak (ages 2-3), Main Street
plum (ages 3-8), 5th Avenue
elm (ages 9-18), East 26th Street
pecan (ages 18-19), Meadowbrook Drive
hickory (ages 20-25), Coburn Drive
dogwood (ags 25-39), East Brow Road
Japanese cherry (ages 40-41), Knoxville
maple (ages 42-44), East Brow Road
*** (ages 44-47), Atlanta
crepe myrtle (ages 47-64), Avalon Circle
lilac ??? (ages 65-67), Mountain Creek Road
magnolia (ages 68-71), St. Elmo Avenue
ornamental cherry tree (72+), Hixson Pike

***   The only trees I remember from Atlanta were pulped to make paper for the books I read in seminary, while studying for my master's degree.