~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Stories suggested to me in the lull after a hurricane:
1. Tales from my very grown children’s childhoods
2. Live Oaks, mangroves and palms – how they behave with hurricanes
Both of these are comforting topics after days of nothing to see and talk about but ugliness and devastation.
1. Word person that I liked to think of myself (as opposed to being a math person, for example), I used big words with both of my children. The two of them have repertoires of their mother’s ways:
“Oooh, Jimmy,” I crooned, enticing him. “These green beans are so delicious,” I spooned green goo out of a baby food jar into his bird-like mouth. His eyes opened wide, and he spit it out. “Eeuw, dewicious,” he said with disgust. When I forgetfully used that word again with the peas, he clamped his little mouth shut, jerked away shaking his head and tried to escape from his highchair.
When Aubry at 3 was given a pair of hand-me-down pea-green patent leather MaryJanes, I said in a soothing voice, “Oh, Aub, honey, these are atrocious.” She held up one dainty foot to me, smiled with adoration at her new shoes. “OOOOH, these are ‘trocious,” she whispered. She wore them all day and into bed each night. She showed them off to the neighbors and to strangers in the grocery store. She watched her feet as she danced around the house singing “Trocious, trocious.”
Our threesome, all of us now into nostalgia, laugh very hard at their stories, even when they are laughing at me, Mom-Of-The-Words teaching them in classic show-and-tell the exact opposite of what the words meant.
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2. After a natural disaster like a hurricane, our familiar world is gone, and the ugliness left is so disheartening, many people just leave, never to return. The rest take pictures for the insurance company and dig in. There seems no end to clean-up. We’re throwing away unidentifiable items alongside ruined things we love. After days of filling trash bags and dumpsters, we finally get to dirt, rake up the tiny pieces of the house and the carport and the shed and the yard and start again. We wait for the roofers and window and door contractors, the siding specialists and the front steps guys.
As we work and watch them work, we stop now and then to look at the bent and broken and battered foliage of a once pretty, park-like community. Some of the trees will survive, but it’s hard to tell right now — everything looks close to death. A giant banyan tree 100 feet high and at least 50 feet across — leafless. Twenty years ago, the first time I saw the bare branches of a banyan completely denuded, I cried. Within a month it was covered with small pale leaves that soon became big green leaves, and the banyan was itself again. So, this one will return. Banyans are native to India; wild winds and too much water have no permanent effect on them. But the sight of one of them having been attacked so ferociously blanks my mind – how could it be that they could survive naked?
The Live Oaks, too, are naked, looking like their northern cousins who naturally shed their leaves come fall. Live Oaks don’t ease into hibernation, they grow and shed leaves all year round. After a storm like Ian, the majority of Live Oaks will return to normal except for maybe a twist in the trunk, a hanging foot-thick branch left for the cutters. Their nature is to heal the damage of a broken limb and put all their energy into repairing what of themselves they can save. Within months, they will return to good health, leafy and lovely; they all want to live a long life, just like us. The big Live Oaks, the Grandfathers they are called, sometimes succumb to the wind because of their great height and wide canopy that is too much for the force of 150 mile per hour winds; the root system is unable to hang on to them. It’s a sad thing to see, because if they’re not hurricaned or cut down as civilization advances, their average lifespan is 600 years on earth. Some have lived a thousand to 2000 years. They grow fast – 12 to 24 inches a year –and are so graceful in their strength and vast, swooping limbs that my blood pressure goes down merely looking at them, driving by them or under their majestic compassion; they are protectors of us.
And the skinny palms, so frail looking – they should look helpless because they are grass, 100-foot strands of grass swaying with the wind. They bend during a storm, sometimes uproot and lie dead across a boat or through somebody’s kitchen window. But most of them bow before the gale and survive, slanted perhaps, their topknots buzzed like an Army barber got hold of them. Within a week of the storm, I stop clearing the debris for a minute, look up and see one tightly wrapped frond sticking straight up from the middle of the tall and bedraggledd grass, this one a coconut palm, the first of many to survive and fill out and grace the landscape till the next storm.
Four varieties of mangrove live along rivers and beaches in sub-tropical and tropical areas, protecting the land from wave action and protecting the sea from pollution leaking off the land. Mangrove species are by name white, black, red and buttonwood, their leaves full of tannin that dyes the rivers a tea tint. They can grow to 80 feet, usually along tidal rivers and barrier islands. Like the oaks, they are evergreen, growing and shedding their leaves year-round. After a hurricane’s decimation of leaves, which makes the landscape brown and dull and hopeless, the saving grace of green mangrove leaves draws the eye, to beauty, and hope.
