A GENEALOGY WITH TREES by Mary Peelen
Between 1950 and 1970, Dutch elm disease killed virtually all the elm trees in Michigan. I was born in January of 1961, mid-pandemic, and by the time I was old enough to identify them, they were already dead or dying. In Grand Rapids, a doomed elm was easy to spot: it was marked for removal with a bright ring of yellow paint around the trunk.
Long before my birth, hundreds of thousands of American elms shaded Michigan during its short but scorching summers. They were magnificent trees; they grew tall quickly and leafed into ample canopies that branched high from the ground, far above the roads and rooftops and barns. Imagine how pleasant it must have been when the Midwest was home to elms ubiquitous as churches. Imagine a long country drive in August, the road shaded by a bower of green.
* * *
About a decade ago, the mayors of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements of Paris held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate changes to our street. As part of a citywide greening initiative, rue Rambuteau was narrowed to a single lane of traffic, the sidewalks were widened and some lovely wooden benches were installed. Across the street, workmen planted a row of curbside saplings, spindly caged things with thin gray trunks protected by metal disks with slits to let the water through, all surrounded by stone.
Our flat is tiny, a dollhouse on the fifth floor of a nondescript building on a fabulous block in the Marais not far from the Hôtel de Ville. Its floor is oak – ancient stuff in terrible shape that creaks under your feet when you walk on it. We bought the place nearly twenty years ago, got lucky, and yet the transaction was so ridiculously stressful that I still obsess about it. Buying in Paris made me afraid of people. The banker, in particular, was formidable.
Playing Parisian landlady while living in California was a perpetual strain – always an emergency with plumbing, or the heat, or the leaky roof. Keys were lost, and everything became broken: dishes, windows, appliances, contracts. Long-delayed maintenance on the façade meant years of scaffolding and construction, annoying everyone. Neighbors were difficult. So was money. It was hard on our marriage. I wanted to give up so many times.
The trees felt like a gift.
* * *
I saw my friend Margaret’s children a lot when they were babies. Their house was nearby and I’d ride my bike over for afternoon visits a few times a week. Later, when the kids were in school, Margaret shuttled them between judo and rowing, softball games, Chinese language class and Cambodian dance. Boy Scouts were part of the program for a while too, I think. By that time, I’d moved across the Bay and was back in graduate school trying to write a novel. Years went by. I still think of them as toddlers.
I last saw Margaret’s kids at the dinner marking the first anniversary of her death. We all managed to keep it light, to exchange news and pleasantries for most of the evening until Laura raised a glass, suggested we toast to Margaret, to her memory. Sadness sunk the whole 187 room and we never recovered. I couldn’t talk, I could hardly breathe. Finally, the kids did the dishes. I went home early.
* * *
This morning, four gendarmes on horseback are riding up rue Rambuteau, clattery hooves echoing off the buildings like something out of a different century. Our sills have sagged, and the windows stick. I rattle the handle. I pull hard.
If only for the light, Paris is enough. Centuries of weather have smoothed the limestone façade across the street, and it reflects sun the way a monument does, glowing with sepia tones, stone transforming itself into splendor. Though born in Michigan, I’ve lived most of my life in California and call it home. But I plan on finishing my days in Paris. Time moves differently here, with more attention to history and its artifacts, to their maintenance and regeneration. To the meaning they bestow on those who care about them.
Down below, the horses maintain an easy pace despite the traffic. Hard to believe all those cars and trucks don’t frighten them. How do they stay so calm? I notice, too, the saplings across the street – not so small anymore – and size them up the way I might examine someone’s teenagers I haven’t seen in a decade. I’m less indulgent with adolescents than I am with infants. I begin to expect things from them. The trees aren’t gorgeous – still caged-in and leggy – but they look tough enough.
* * *
About a month after Margaret died, her widow, Laura, wrote to me: I feel so guilty. I told Margaret I’d have the dead live oak taken down, but I never got around to it.
It didn’t matter, of course. That oak didn’t kill Margaret. She’d always had a hard time hanging on, and everyone knows it was Laura who kept her alive for twenty years. But I understand Laura’s sadness, as well as her guilt. I was meant to see Margaret the day before she died, but had to cancel our date because I had a migraine.
Margaret looked out at the dead live oak every day for more than a year. The window over her kitchen table framed it perfectly. That’s where she wrote, and where her children did their homework. Once, when they were still in preschool, Margaret climbed the live oak to 188 hang a tire. At least I imagine that’s how the swing got up there. I never actually asked.
* * *
In Paris, thousands of tall, elegant elm trees once lined the grand boulevards, and they made all the parks cool, green, and elegant. Until the 1960s, the elm was by far the most common tree in Paris. Then, just as in North America, they died almost all at once.
A few isolated trees survived the plague. There’s a large one not far from our apartment, behind Hôtel de Ville, directly in front of the church of St.-Gervais. Church records document an elm tree standing in this exact spot for more than a millennium. Each time the existing elm dies, the church plants a new one in its place. It’s a sacred tradition.
I went to visit the latest specimen yesterday. This particular tree is ninety, same age as my mom. Surrounded by a chain barrier, stone buildings, and lots of cars, it’s hemmed in and looks kind of lonely, though its isolation is probably what saved it from disease. Evening dropping over Paris, the stone steps of St.-Gervais were heavy with homelessness: men in tents and sleeping bags; others smoking, drinking. They watched me looking at the elm. Its bark is thick with a marvelous braided texture in multiple shades of gray, warm and rich as a textile.
* * *
Margaret was a daredevil. Of course she climbed that live oak. Once, she even climbed to the top of the Bay Bridge with a band of scofflaws in the middle of a dark winter night. They hopped a series of fences, then scaled the utility ladder all the way to the top. She said it was crazy windy up there.
She’d never felt more alive.
* * *
The oldest known map of Paris was woven in tapestry in 1540. It was an ambitious work, big as a room – 240 square feet – meticulously detailing buildings and bridges, wells, walkways, churches, the streets of the city, place names stitched in tiny scrolls above each one. Also, quite charmingly, it included the elm tree in front of the church of St.-Gervais.
The tapestry map was displayed annually on the façade of the Hôtel de Ville, though its last recorded sighting was when it was used as a foot-rug at a ball celebrating the birth of the dauphin, first son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1782. The dauphin died seven years later, a sickly child. The tapestry, too, is long gone. Popular legend is that it was burned in the Revolution, but historians believe that it simply disintegrated and fell into tatters.
* * *
In 1968, when I was seven, a tornado devastated huge swaths of Grand Rapids. Locally, it’s still known as The Big Tornado. It was pretty traumatic for me, in large part, I think, because I’d just seen The Wizard of Oz for the first time, and mid-twister, while hunkering down in the basement, I imagined I saw a witch flying by the window along with a barn and a cow or two. But my brother and sister also remember the enormous weeping willow in our driveway the next morning, and the huge elm that fell across Edna Street, and how, at ground level, we played like baby birds inside the treetop branches until crews came and took it all away.
Down the street, a great blue pine fell in Mrs. Eboch’s yard. Neighborhood kids called her wicked because she yelled at us when we ran through her garden. We were unrepentant, considered it a legitimate shortcut. I overheard my mom say that Mrs. Eboch cried over that blue pine like a mother who lost her baby, and it was the first time I understood that adults could cry. I also wondered how you could lose a baby.
* * *
Behind our Paris flat, the window of my study opens onto a courtyard on Passage Sainte-Avoie which we share with another apartment building, three art galleries, a hair salon, and a municipal crèche with a mansard roof. In the far corner on the right, there’s a deciduous tree surrounded by cobblestones. I’ve been observing it for a few weeks – noting its shape and size, the way it moves in the wind – but just today I confirmed that it’s an elm. What are the odds? A French agriculture report says fewer than a thousand elms remain in Paris.
The courtyard is narrow, so the tree’s in shade all morning, but in the afternoon light, the foliage goes hunter green, glinting white at a certain angle. Autumn now, the leaves grow darker, heavier. They’re having a harder time hanging on in the cold. The more I look, the 190 more I think the elm looks a little depressed. It’s making a good show of it though.
* * *
Wind and a change in the weather and I’m afraid to look outside: a migraine owns that sky. How is it possible that Margaret died nearly five years ago? I worry about her kids every day. Suicide is a hard way to lose a mother. She hung herself, but not in that live oak.
There are small mercies.
* * *
When rain falls on the roof of the crèche, it sounds like a toy piano. Five flights up, I can see directly into the windows where caretakers have a kitchen and meeting space. They also have a black cat that spends its day out on the roof when it’s sunny. If I stare too long, it seems to resent the intrusion into its privacy and closes its eyes as if to say, I can’t see you. I lean out my window and look down into the middle of the elm. No burned-out branches, and it’s leafy close to the trunk, so I know this tree isn’t diseased.
Smokers in the courtyard look at their phones. They don’t notice the elm. In the building next door, there’s a family with two young daughters in hand-knit pink hats. Mornings, the mother walks ahead in her fashionable shoes, urges the girls to hurry. The elm, the cobblestones, the children, the phones, the cigarettes, the sound of high heels in the courtyard, they all hold onto this little corner of Paris in place.
* * *
On a bright day in January, 1961 – the day after my birth, in fact – Michigan roads were covered with ice, and cornfields were deep with drifting snow, when my grandparents’ car hit an elm tree. They’d just visited my mother in the maternity ward at the hospital. My grandfather was driving, fell asleep – there were no skid marks – totaled the car, and walked away from the accident.
My grandmother wasn’t so lucky. It took forever to hail the ambulance that delivered her to a small rural hospital with only a young intern on duty. She suffered. She bled. She spoke to her husband before she died. She talked about Jesus. She wept.
* * *
The courtyard elm is going gold from underneath, warm and soft like a velveteen lining. The tree is still so leafy, it shades the entire windowed hallway of the crèche. When it drops its leaves, the babies will be exposed to harsh winter sun all afternoon. The leaves are almond-shaped, toothed edges. They’re slightly textured, not like the shiny smoothness of a maple leaf. When I think of oak trees, I picture the black oaks in Michigan. In the fall, their leaves look tough and leathery with needle-sharp points, and yet they’re brittle things; they crumble into a million pieces inside your hand. Live oaks are much tougher: the wood is notoriously hard and the leaves don’t fall. They hang on, evergreen.
* * *
Once, when I was small, my mother packed my sister and me into the family station wagon. I remember that I was wearing my brand-new Red Ball Jets, the coolest shoes ever, sky blue canvas tops with a rubber toe and a bright red dot at the heel. For a three-year-old Michigan girl, that red dot was fashionable as any red sole on a Louboutin in Paris.
We drove to the place where my grandmother was killed, a stretch of country road in southwestern Michigan. Nothing special, nothing holy, no towering cathedral branches, no stained blue of church windows, no poetry. It wasn’t even a long row of trees, just three of them on one side of an old tar road. The trunks were thick, still sturdy and strong. Each one held up a bouquet of heavy, dying limbs, bony things, grasping at the air in the too-bright sky.
* * *
In mythology, elms connect the worlds of the living and the dead. They’re planted by tombs, and witnessed by visitors to the underworld.
* * *
This is it, my mom said to no one, or to my sister and me in the back seat. She opened the driver’s side door, walked over to the middle of the three trees, put her hand on the rough bark of the trunk. She kicked the tree, then got back in the car.
* * *
3 a.m. I’m afraid of death – not mine, but the trees. Disease, a global pandemic. Fungus spread by elm bark beetles.
* * *
Once, when I was a teenager, I went skiing in the woods at night with my sister and her friends, took a steep hill too fast, hit sheer ice on a curve, glanced off the track, and briefly, I flew. The thrill didn’t last long – I took a tree dead in the middle of my forehead.
I wonder if my grandmother saw it coming. The tree I mean. I would have been terrified, trapped in a metal machine hurtling toward the end of time.
* * *
Morning drama: the courtyard is wall-to-wall with wailing babies enduring a fire drill at the crèche. Alarm blaring, harried women wheel infants out of the building, three to a crib. Toddlers are loosed outside like puppies tumbling over each other. Absolutely everyone is crying.
* * *
When he was a boy, my brother-in-law helped his dad identify trees infested with Dutch elm disease. They’d cut branches from an ailing tree and bundle them into a white linen bag with a tag sewn into the seam for recording the specimen’s location. The sample was sent to a lab in Lansing, and when it came back positive for disease, they marked the trunk with paint.
By the time I knew what they were, all the elms in Grand Rapids were diseased. See? said my dad, pointing up to a constellation of branches, blackened, bare and freakish. That’s how you can tell.
A painted yellow ring, a halo encircling the trunk.
* * *
When I think of the tapestry map of Paris, I imagine its weaver tying the elm of St.-Gervais into the grid, securing its place in history with a knot. The weaver’s work bestowed a weird kind of power on the elm of St.-Gervais – timelessness – as if, along with silk and gold threads, the soul of the tree was pulled through the loom and granted a place in the material world.
* * *
Late afternoon: it’s raining again. The courtyard elm dropped its yellow leaves on the cobblestones. What remains in the tree is a rather unflattering shade of brown. All seems listless, as if holding on out of 193 habit. My window is just below chimneypot level, and wood smoke from a nearby fireplace hangs in the air. Margaret once wrote to me that she could distinguish pine from other trees by their smell. Sitting by a campfire, she loved knowing that the burning wood was pine, or else it wasn’t.
Revolutionaries burned tapestries because they were symbols of the Ancien Régime, but also (and for the most part) in order to melt down and harvest the gold threads. Huge and heavy, each tapestry was worth a fortune. The tapestry map of Paris was not part of their haul; it was already in shreds before the conflagrations began. Revolutionaries did, however, set fire to the elm of St.-Gervais. Eyewitnesses described the blaze in outraged letters and newspaper articles. The church promptly replanted another elm tree in its place.
I imagine a young priest with a shovel and a pick axe digging up the roots of the dead elm out there in the rain (yes it has to be raining), planting a sapling from the monastery nursery in its place. He’s wearing old boots and a brand-new frock, ironed and starched. He plants the tree for the glory of God, of course, but he can’t help resenting the dirt accumulating under his fingernails. He’s an educated boy, his mother’s favorite, destined for the seminary. Why am I out here digging in the mud? he mutters, tamping the roots down. The sapling, meanwhile, takes its place in a long series of trees, each one performing eternity.
* * *
A tree lives slowly, more so than a human being, more patiently and deliberately. Tree death seems to upset the natural order of things. The loss of Mrs. Eboch’s enormous blue pine was a genuine catastrophe; I can see that now. And I keep thinking about Margaret’s live oak. Who could have imagined that gorgeous specimen would succumb? No one. I didn’t believe Margaret would let go, either. She was strong. And the elm that killed my grandmother? It grows more powerful the older I get, an icon on the family crest woven directly into the story of my birth.
* * *
Tonight, the Paris sky is deep blue, and the courtyard is shadowy. It’s lit by an old streetlight hidden in the far corner behind the elm. Filtered through the branches, the night light spreads out like mist. Dusk blooms around the tree, extending itself out over the cobblestones. This courtyard was woven into that ancient tapestry map, too. At the 194 time, it was a stone walkway in front of the Convent of Sainte-Avoie, a community of widows.
I’m trying to tie the threads together, weaving a place-name for Margaret on the map of what matters. For my grandmother, too, though of course I never knew her. And these elm trees, they’ve come to mean a great deal to me, and also limestone façades, sidewalk cafés, and even French bankers. They’re elements of history, they linger. If tended, they grow into something more solid than memory.
Down in the courtyard, my elm is leafless, wintering. I think of it as my elm now, though I love to imagine it thriving after I’m dead. Isolated and protected, it could easily survive long after those babies I see in the crèche are grown and gone.
History may not condemn elms entirely. French and Dutch botanists are developing disease-resistant strains, and the elm of the Church of St.-Gervais will always survive. That tree is so deeply rooted in Paris, I feel certain it will weather whatever comes next. It’s warm this winter, and the young city trees are budding early. I like to keep an eye on them, to note their growth, a measure of my years in Paris, a city I’ve grown to love. A walk is never a bad idea is what Margaret always used to say. I still hear her voice in my mind nearly every day. And so, yes, I’ll walk over to the church tomorrow to visit the elm again, its significance drawn through generations of priests and scribes, artists and mapmakers. When I put my hand on its rough bark, I, too, am creative, alive, an agent in the process of history-making.
Mary Peelen is the author of the poetry collection Quantum Heresies (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, New Critique, Poetry Review (UK), and other journals.