Looking At Life Through A Window
Vivid reminders of death surround them. Dying leaves flutter to the ground. Mourners wander among row upon row of tombstones. But the sentinels take no notice.
When my aunt, Mabel Rose Tyson, offered to escort us to Maplewood Cemetery (Harrison, Ark.), we eagerly accepted. Roaming through hundred-year-old cemeteries has often been a pleasant but bittersweet experience allowing me to momentarily touch the forgotten lives and sorrows of others.
Upon cresting the hill to Maplewood, the majesty of the sentinels demanded disbelieving gasps. Six hundred sugar maples, a worthy testimony to the foresight and diligence of The Twentieth Century Club of Harrison, stood at attention in full fall regalia. From crimson to orange to yellow to lingering hints of green, the panoply of the rainbow adorned them.
Their arms arched above the lanes, forming colorful canopies over lanes and headstones. Yet in the midst of that spot dedicated to the dead, there was life. Life in color that brightens dreary days and weary souls. Life in the assurance that new beginnings arise from death. Life in the hope of coming spring.
According to cemetery spokesman Bruce Richardson, planting of 600-plus sugar maples began about 1920. Since they can actually live as long as 300 to 400 years and achieve heights of 90 to 120 feet, these trees are relative youngsters.
We took beaucoup photographs--all keepers. One stands out, a diamond among stones. We're convinced that the secret of its uniqueness lies not in the magnificent foliage, but in an unexpected intruder.
In snapping the picture, I propped against a tree, allowing a sliver of bark to creep into the right-hand edge of the field of view. But that rough, black bark creates a perspective that frames the scene with the realism of looking at life through a window.
Playing second fiddle to brilliant color, the bark on young sugar maples is dark gray, close, smooth and firm. And with increasing age, bark color becomes highly variable from brown to gray to near black. Not surprisingly, its roughness increases proportionally.
Thus the six hundred sentinels stand erect with the indelible handprint of time upon trunks of wrinkled, craggy, aging bark. But year by year, however, the spirit within them continues to exude color and variety that refresh body and soul of all who pass their way.
As I consider these stalwarts of Maplewood Cemetery, the words of James A. Garfield, our 20th president, come to mind. "If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old."
Truly, God's hand in nature pens a book of instruction teaching us that wrinkled exteriors do not demand craggy spirits. To have looked at life through the window of realism--and gained perspective--can bring refreshment to body and soul to all who pass our way.
We have 600 good examples.
Copyright 2002 James McAlister
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