A Day in the Life of a Tree

These two photos are of Wagners as it looks today, and how it looked in the early 1950's. In the almost 60 years since the two photos were taken, the store (house) has hardly changed a bit.

What has changed is the size of the tree!

Mrs Horn told me the photo of the house from the early 1950's was taken the day they planted the young tree in their yard. Could the Wagners have predicted that tree would still be standing (and going strong) sixty years later?

Think of how many kids that tree saw walk in and out of Wagners store? How many kids rested underneath the branches in the shade on hot summer days? Perhaps you were one of those kids?

Gigantic trees, 50-60 years old, are not rare in Manor Ridge. I myself have two pin oak trees, probably planted around the same time (early 1950's) which stand well over 50 feet tall.

These types of slow growing, but long living trees were the types planted by our parents when Manor Ridge was a young and brand new development. They were planted by people who knew it would take decades for these trees to fully develop, decades until they could begin to enjoy the shade and fruit of these trees. But it was their belief in the future, patience, and knowledge that they would still be living in their home (and enjoying the trees planted around it) for forty or more years, that led them to plant these types of trees.

Sadly, in new developments today, if people plant trees at all, they are typically the fast-growing but short lived variety, trees like the Bradford Pear. People today don't think forty or fifty years into the future, and certainly do not expect to still be living in the house where they are planting a tree, that far into the future.

There is something to be said for the stability, the routine, and the certainty of the era we grew up in, the era of the 1950's-1970's. The pace of life was slow, like the speed at which these trees grew. But the culture our parents built in Manor Ridge, like the trees, was made to last, to persevere, to grow straight and tall and strong and last for a very long time.

Like the Wagners house, and their tree, and the memories we still have of those days.