Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember that I used to think of trees as being more or less the height of adults -- a little taller, obviously, but with their crowns or heads (I thought of them as heads but didn't use the word) starting roughly in the same region as where adults' heads were.

The exception to this rule was the giant weeping willow behind our house in Stormville, with its yellow rubber or plastic anchoring loops wired to some of the branches and which my mother told me were lightning rods (and which may have been -- I guess I still don't know -- certainly my image of a lightning rod is this U-shaped attachment to a tree. There would have to be more of course, and I don't remember seeing any more on the willow. I remember feeling safe though because it was right behind our house, a limit to the driveway and the place where we could play easily, and it towered over the house and so would protect us from lightning. (This place, this area, is one of my most intense and archaic memories -- I think it belongs to my first explorations of the world beyond the limits of my caregivers' immediate scope, and so the world first seemed separate and large and indifferent to me. I recorded my memory of it a little here but I can't come close to the sense of strangeness of these primordial elements of the world "that did not live like living men.")

Back to the trees: the willow was the tall tree, and all others I thought of as being simply on the scale, more or less, of adults. Then much later I came to realize -- somewhat to my surprise -- how much taller trees were. (My mother had told me about redwoods, but they were -- to my imagination of them -- the exception to the general run of things. She told me of seeing one which a road passed through, which made me think of the Lincoln tunnel in New York, so I thought they were really big.)

I think I realized the height of the trees -- a height I still am sometimes surprised by -- when we moved from 2-G to 7-F. The tops of the trees in the park across the street were almost as high as the window I looked out from. Seven stories! I think at 2-G I thought of trees as coming up to the second story -- adult scale, that is. But these were much taller. They towered, in ways I hadn't imagined from walking underneath them.

I think also that I've become aware of how trees loom since growing to adult size myself. I'm on the same scale as my parents now, but the trees are still much taller. Now they seem part of the strange indifferent outside world, and not (as they once did) the community of care-givers. Trees have become much stranger to me, even as the rest of the world has become less so.

posted by william 9:34 AM
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