AUGUST 22, 2021 – Yesterday I took a hike in the tree garden of Björnholm. It was my inspection since our recent three-week road trip to New England. The day was beautiful—warm, sunny, with a breeze off the lake and reaching into the woods With hand-clippers I tamed the more aggressive raspberry bushes that had shot their thorny stems into the pathway.
As an aging white guy, I think more about leaving the world a better place—planting trees, for example, to replace some that I’d arranged to be harvested. It’s circular effort filled with irony: cutting down trees to raise money to pay the taxes so that the land wouldn’t have to be sold so that the trees wouldn’t be cut down. One could fairly characterize my effort as one of penance more than an act of “leaving the world a better place.”
But most of the hundreds of “penance” pine that I planted are now well on their way to reaching heaven, a place I imagine this place to be when future generations lay eyes upon it. Last year, I placed numerous trail signs—painted on treated wood attached to metal stakes driven into the ground to resist the ravages of time—markers for future generations that walk through the earth-bound paradise I imagine the tree garden then to be.
I realize fully that eventually the sun will burn itself out. If the planet doesn’t first collide with a comet or implode from the force of human folly, the sun’s flame-out will, of course, extinguish all life on earth. By then my trees and signs will have been long atomized, but odds are I’ll be atomized long before all my trees are toast and most likely a few years, at least, before all my signs are also one with the dirt.
These thoughts floated faintly through my head as I stepped lightly along the trail. Then reality struck: one of my signs, marked “NOR WAY,” had fallen flat on its face! (With a stylized evergreen painted between “NOR” and “WAY,” arched toward the “NOR” to indicate the direction of the “NORWAY” trail, the sign bears a triple entendre in reference to (a) Norway the country (land of my wife’s heritage); (b) the Norway “volunteer” seedlings that have appeared in that section of the garden; and (c) Nor-way, as in “north way”—the northern part of the garden).
I slammed on the brakes—dumbfounded and not a little upset that something designed to last for decades hadn’t stood up for a year. I inspected the sign itself (it was fine) and the four-foot metal stake to which it was attached—and that I’d driven well into the ground using a sledge-hammer. The stake had been bent 90 degrees at grade level and with so much force the rivets holding the stabilizing fin to the stake had been popped off.
Immediately, I assumed the role of Inspector Poirot. (Cont.)
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
