I found it. Three weeks ago, when I was staying on Long Island with Adrienne and Matt after Emilio was born, one morning I ran past a house that explained the strange, drooping evergreens I saw in many yards. The running here is on grids of suburban streets, and the trees are mostly lovely — tall maples with full and even crowns, large hollies bearing slick, deep green leaves, conical spruces dominating a lawn. But I couldn’t figure out the attraction of the evergreens I saw in many yards, scraggly pines of some sort, draping down across themselves, ragged and limp, often a single trunk or branch draping five or six feet like a hunched over old man. What’s the point, I thought.
Then I ran past this house, that had trained the tree’s trunk and branches into swooping arches across the yard, over the driveway, in a peak over the front door. Now I got it. This was stunning. But then I couldn’t remember where the house with the fabulous trees was. I knew it was on a corner, I knew it was deep in the criss-cross grid of houses lined with streets, but I couldn’t find it again.
Today I did. Now I know how to find the house and I now know the trees are Weeping Blue Cedars. They only grow a foot to a foot and a half a year, so this amazing lace work of cedar gracing the house and yard must have taken decades. Such patient beauty.
Grace Mattern 