Dangermond.org

Bob made me one of the best cosmopolitans I’ve ever had and the arch in his house, just beautiful and the tree, a loss.

Faubourg St. John losing spectacular old magnolia

Beloved tree too far gone from termites

Thursday, July 09, 2009

By Katy Reckdahl

Staff writer – Times Picayune

Madeline Peyton may wear a black armband today, in mourning for a fallen companion: the spectacular magnolia tree that’s shaded her house on LePage Street since she moved there 35 years ago. She’ll miss its massive roots in her side yard, the fragrance from its flowers in the springtime and the way the wind sounds as it moves through the tree’s branches.

“I’m losing a friend,” she said.

Arborists will begin to cut into the badly termite-damaged tree today in a three-day, $10,000 process that will use cranes to lift the tree’s heavy branches as they’re removed, to avoid damage to Peyton’s property and the “twin” house next door that she’s been told were originally built in 1880 by two sisters whom she knows only by their last name: Eschmann.

The neighboring house, a mirror image of hers, belongs to Bob Roso, who is also trying to steel himself for the tree’s upcoming absence. “I don’t want to get too emotional,” he said.

Until today, the tree in the Bayou St. John neighborhood was likely the second-largest magnolia tree in the city, second only to one on the Loyola University campus, arborists told them. But late last month, a huge limb dropped from the tree, revealing the extent of the termites’ devastation. A parade of arborists has advised them that the damage was terminal.

Years ago, Peyton was given an old photo of her house and the tree, by an elderly woman from the Eschmann family who lived in part of what became Roso’s house before moving into a nursing home. “All she said is, ‘This is a picture of your house: I thought you might like to have it,’ ” Peyton said. She can’t identify the two men and the woman captured in the yellowing image, standing in front of the house’s wrought-iron fence. But from the outfits, they estimate that the photo was taken around 1900 and that the tree was then about 20 years old.

The two neighbors speculate that after the sisters built the houses, they planted the magnolia on the exact center of the shared property line, halfway between the side porches that face each other.

Merlin Eschmann, 81, answered the phone at his Metairie home on Wednesday and shed some light on the houses’ history. Even 70 years ago, when he was a boy, the magnolia’s trunk was too wide to climb, he said.

“It was a tremendous tree even then,” said Eschmann, the son of a florist who grew up around the corner in a house on North White Street. His cousins Laura and Julia Richards lived in Peyton’s house and his aunt Sarah Eschmann lived in the other home. Aunt Sarah lived with and kept house for his Uncle Beanie, whose given name Eschmann has now forgotten despite still-vivid memories of the weekly nickels he’d get from the relative, an engraver at Adler’s jewelry store who also created an elaborate wooden arch between two rooms of his aunt’s house, he said.

As a boy, Eschmann said, he and his brother Joe would take a shortcut to the twin houses through the Richardses’ chicken yard, located behind their house and next door to his. His kin constantly walked between the houses, he said. “We were a very close-knit family.”

The tree, which was like part of his family, had been planted by the previous generation of his family, he said, recalling its fragrant blossoms and broad canopy. It’s sad to think of the houses without that tree “after so long,” he said.

Roso and Peyton will each save a slice of the tree trunk, they said. And they have talked about planting another tree in place of the magnolia. “Maybe we’ll plant a new tree and create a new history,” he said.

Then, they may stand in front of the wrought-iron fence and pose for a new photo with their new tree, she said.

. . . . . . .

Katy Reckdahl

Should dark times happen during dark seasons? I wonder. This summer began on a high note – the baby I had been dreaming about for the past 20 years was going to be born the same day my brother was born – June 8th. And we anxiously feathered our nest, got our major projects out of the way, and readied our loved ones for this new beginning.

And then a cloud on the horizon, the mother changed her mind.

T’s mother and niece were coming to America to help us with the newborn baby, instead they were now coming for a six week visit. They arrived to celebrity deaths – Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite. We were saddened by the sudden death of a friend’s son. And then there was my mother, whose condition was spiraling downward at such a clip, I couldn’t even keep up.

In the midst of this, I was working on the baby book to send to a new mother who might choose us. Working on the book became a drudgery instead of a joy because we hadn’t fully recovered from the baby we were supposed to be welcoming home. Instead, an accidental phone call from the mother who had changed her mind, who thought she was calling for a job application, then the awkward recognition that it was us she had called. “How’s the baby?” “She’s beautiful.” Click.

And then mom went in the hospital and every day, she’s stable, she’s not. Well last night, Friday, TGIF, when I thought I had gotten through the week, the 2AM call comes and mom is headed to ICU and I’m back in the middle of the night on the I-10 headed to the unknown world of the hospital where no one knows really what to do, they only know how to react to what happens.

By 7AM, sitting in the ICU waiting room with the youngest of my four brothers, I listened to him tell me about the rough past year, the loss of his burgeoning mortgage brokerage, continuing issues with his daughter, his own mother dying last year, and how he was trying to cope but one day just burst out crying and couldn’t stop. And I told him, my tears just don’t come, every time I think they might, they just stop somewhere. He said, “I’m here for you.” Of course, that almost made me cry.

How did the Summer of Birth become the Summer of Death and Doom? Hard to say. That’s life, huh?

When mom went in the hospital, I didn’t call the rest of the family because in many ways I feel as if they abandoned her some time ago – except for two sister in laws, the boys and their children have carved a life for themselves that does not include her. And hey, I was already dealing with my sister’s hysteria over trying to control me and what was happening with mom from Atlanta (my ability to just hang up the phone has been the best protocol in dealing with her). Yesterday, one of them found out she was in the hospital and so late yesterday to today, they have been coming by to see her.

When I saw them come into her room tonight, I thought to myself that it is amazing how this once very enmeshed family became a pod family and how the pods feel no qualms about just stepping into my mother’s life at a moment in time as if there was an ah ha moment when they remembered that she is someone to them.

I watched them pour into the hospital room, showing mom photos of their kids on their Iphones, reminiscing with her about when they were babies and she did this or that with them, and I saw her eyes light up because finally after all her loneliness and isolation, here she was surrounded like the queen bee with her brood around her.

For reasons that are not clear to me, I feel dispassionate towards the outcome of my mother’s journey this time, unattached to the comings and goings of my siblings and their broods, and my excitement over my future is contained within a small few who share my enthusiasm for what floats my boat or not, because it really doesn’t matter as long as I can lay my head down in peace every night and rise up with joy in my heart.

#7 from the Tao te Ching:

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

I’m starting a new website called I MISS YOGA dot com – due to the hospital runs for mom, works call to sit in front of my desk 24/7 and family visiting from Croatia, my yoga this week was nil – nada – nothing.

I MISS YOGA!!!

I did go, however, to Tai Chi, my second new favorite passtime and T came with me – we were feeling our chi flow and have decided to sign up for Thursday classes. Awesome!

I STILL MISS YOGA and Michele is gone for a few weeks for her Costa Rica retreat – WAAAAAAAAAAH.

I have an Obama sticker that T gave me when he won and I display it proudly on my truck. Today, at the gas station, a guy pulled up and on the back of his truck window he had two 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper with typed messages taped up. One said in all caps DONT BLAME ME I VOTED FOR THE AMERICAN. The other said “NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT HOPE AND CHANGE?”

It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.

The other day friends borrowed our canoe and went out in what soon became something a la Gilligan’s Island, a three minute tour turned to a rescue mission by my neighbor who spied them in the boat with the black clouds and lightning and thunder and afterwards, the little boy made a drawing of the whole event. The lady who ran from her house to wave her hands and tell them she would come save them is now an indelible fixture in their family lore.

I was walking Loca late this morning as it was pouring down rain and I had to wait for it to clear up. When we got to the park, we saw some of our regulars and one guy, who I usually see going the opposite way, was headed the same way as us so we walked together for a while. We were talking about the weather and he said, “Now there’s some people who will find wrong with right each time.”

And I said, “Well, I walk on the sunny side most of the time.”

And then he curiously said, “Well, I’m about to turn off here, Red” (even though my hair has changed my nicknames haven’t), and then he added, “And I’d better cause I might get shot if I keep walking with you.”

He had turned before I could respond but I wanted to call out after him, “I hope those days are behind us.”

Then my Harper’s arrived and while drinking my tea I read John Edgar Wideman’s essay called Fatheralong on race, and he writes at one point, “Race is myth. When we stop talking about race, stop believing in race, it will disappear. Except for its career historically and in people’s memories as the antithesis of human freedom, the embodiment of inequality and injustice that remained far too long a toxic, unresolved paradox in nations proclaiming themselves free.”

It put me in mind of a joke my mother in law told me the other day, where she said, “An American tells a Russian that their train system sucks because a train that is supposed to come at 9AM shows up at 10AM. The Russian looks at the American and says, ‘And what have you done about the blacks?'”

This is “supposed” to be funny if you see that the Russian has no answer for why the system is not working in his country and so instead goes on the offensive with the one astounding fact that comes to his mind about America.

So today, when my friendly walker passed the comment that maybe he would be shot by walking with a white woman, my heart sank a few degrees, because that was what was, but am I naive in thinking it was.

I heard a beautiful piece of music the other day that was called “To Become” and I thought about it a lot afterwards, because after all is that not what it is all about, becoming, whether we stagnate on rung 34 or move upward and outward and in wider spirals or not, we stay in a perpetual state of becoming and at the end, we have become all that we set out to be or chose to be.

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they’ve been set down —

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There’s a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest —

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

~ Jane Hirschfield ~

I was reading an email from my long lost friend where she said she caught up with another friend recently who told her a story about a memory of my friend’s father. It was such a touching story and one that this woman had kept dear for over three decades. It is what I hope to do with my own mother. The other day, a friend called early in the morning and asked how mom is doing and said, “I love your mother, Rachel. She is so witty and sweet. I hope the best for her.”

Today’s reading from the Tao te Ching is #6:

The Tao is called the Great Mother;
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.

And so it is, another friend wrote inquiring about my mother and yet another, all saying the same thing, fond memories of how beautiful and kind and sweet my mother was to them. I think I most want to convey that to the medical staff at the hospital – looks are deceiving, there is more to her than you know.