A couple of years ago, I flew to Boston, visited shrines right and left from Cape Cod to Burlington, VT. By the end of the journey, I had circled back with one more shrine on my list. The home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Cambridge, MA.
There was another reason for visiting Cambridge. An old friend of mine had relocated there to live near her daughter, a doctor working in the area. Leslie was fighting cancer at the time, a fight she has since lost. So I am thankful I had one last wonderful day with her. The Longfellow home was within walking distance of her daughter's house where Leslie was helping to care for her granddaughter, so we bundled the baby into a baby carriage and set off to pay our respects to Henry.
On the way, we passed a few trees. I didn't catch their names. Les and I were too busy catching up, too busy enjoying what we both knew could be our last day together. We didn't tour the house - it was impracticable with the baby, and I didn't want to waste the few hours we had before I had to fly back to Seattle. Instead, we went to a chocolate shop, for a foaming cup of hot white chocolate and a stash of silver-wrapped food of the gods to take home. Almost as good as poetry.
The chocolate is gone, but I still have the trees. They remind me of Les. Beautiful, strong, scrappy, worn by weather, tough protective bark on the outside, sweet heartwood on the inside.
The big shade tree below stands on the front lawn of Henry's house. Longfellow is no longer the giant of letters he was in the years following the Civil War. Evangeline isn't read. The rhythms of Hiawatha are parodied. But there are truth and beauty in them both. Just as there are in these trees.
