… of the building where UD covers monthly Town Council meetings for the Garrett Park Bugle reminds her why she loves her town, the town where she grew up. Like the train station (Image 4) down the street from UD‘s house, it’s small and beautiful and for UD at least very evocative – of stillness, simplicity, and long passages of time.
“It must be nice to live in a neighborhood that’s an arboretum,” writes a local blogger about Garrett Park. It is, and not only in the spring and autumn. In winter the trees are a delicate gray against the snow. In winter the town’s small wooden houses surrounded by big trees make it feel like a Japanese garden, a quiet island.
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Yesterday, for the first time after Hurricane Sandy, I walked to the top of our property, a thickly wooded hill overlooking a plunge down to train tracks. We thought no trees fell during the storm, but here was a massive fall – a dead elm with so broad a bifurcated trunk I thought it was two trees. As I lopped through smaller branches, most of the wood I saw was hollowed and rotten, home to generations of critters. Dry dusty vines looping around the trunks gave them a Southern Gothic feel. The vines came loose in my hand. I raked the logs and leaves that covered a path I’d made through the woods. Now, with some climbing, you can get to the end of the yard.