Trees of My Youth

No, I’m not talking about family trees.  I’m talking about trees – like the ones your find in the forest.  But these are not just any trees, they are trees associated with many memories from when I was young.  The main reason I’m talking about that is because I wanted to post a favorite photo from my childhood.  I actually thought I had posted it before.  But when I searched my postings, I didn’t find it.  I thought I may have posted a photo of the tree from the photo in one of the photos from my snow post from last year, but I didn’t post that one either.

The mimosa tree at 758 Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana, in May of 1967.

This is the photo I’m talking about.  Isn’t it great?  It’s a photo of me and two of my siblings in the mimosa tree at our home in Jennings in 1967.  We lived in the yellow house at 758 Lucy Street.  We had moved there in 1964.  Later we would put wood siding on the house, but at this time the house was still yellow.  Not that you can see it in this photo.  At first glance you notice our dog Princess at the base of the tree and me sitting in the tree above her.

But then you look closer and you can see my younger sister Jamie to the right and my older brother Al a little higher up on that same branch.  All six of us kids used to play up in that tree.  Even other kids from the neighborhood played in the tree.  One time we had a few too many people in the tree.  I was on a branch with one of my Minter neighbors and the branch cracked beneath us.

So many memories of that tree.  I remember talking with my brother Rob and his friend Celia Joe under that tree.  I remember my sister Jodie and her friend Pam speaking their secret language under that tree.  Now that I think about it, they may have been speaking pig Latin and I didn’t know what it was yet.  Karen, Jamie, and I (and maybe Al) used to climb up in the tree and pretend that the seed pods were money, so we collected as many as we could.  We were rich!

The Landry family in 1963 in Jennings, Louisiana.

One of my first memories associated with trees is from around 1963.  That’s when we lived out in the country!  Actually we lived just north of the I-10 in Jennings on Highway 26 in a two story house we rented for two years.  On the west property line near the house was a fig tree.  I’m not sure if it is the same fig tree you see in this photo which I have shared before.  But I remember a baby bird falling out of a nest in the tree and someone told me not to touch it.  If I would touch it, the mama bird would smell me on the bird and not want anything to do with her little baby bird anymore.  Something I believed without questioning for the longest time.   Birds are very devoted to their young, even if they do smell of stinky little boys.

I don’t have a photo of one of my favorite trees.  It was a tree my grandfather Bucklin had in his yard.  My grandfather Fred Bucklin was a nurseryman and one of his specialties was grafting.  He did that a lot with citrus trees.  He would graft the better tasting trees onto the hardier root stocks.  The tree that was my favorite was one that had several different citrus fruits on the same tree.  He had grafted parts of a lemon tree, a lime tree, a tangerine tree, and a grapefruit tree all on the same trunk.  I’m not exactly sure of the types of fruit, but I know there were four of them.  So it produced all four different fruits.  I always enjoyed eating those fresh citrus fruits from their trees out in the country in Hathaway.

Another memory that came up this week is associated with trees.  When we moved to Jennings in 1964, the neighbors to the east of us were the Theunissens.  The mother Carol was a fellow 1951 graduate of Hathaway with my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  They had some large tallow or china ball trees in their back yard.  I have a memory of them having a rope line from one tree to another and we were zip lining across the yard.  It’s a “memory” that I’m not sure is real.  Maybe one of the Theunissens will verify that one way or the other.  I’m very curious.

What I am sure of is that my brother Al and I helped the neighbors on the other side of us – the Hotards – build a clubhouse at the base of their big pine tree in the back yard.  No girls allowed!  I remember climbing that big pine tree, too.  What a mess!  You get that nasty pine sap on your hands and it is so difficult to get it off.  We had a few big oak trees in our yard through the years that I liked to climb as well.  No sap to worry about.  When I was older, I even climbed up there with my little 3-year-old niece Sarah.  We went far higher than we should have, though nothing bad happened. 

Before I go, I thought I’d mention the historic event that happened today.  Queen Elizabeth of England died after over 70 years of reign.  She lived to the ripe old age of 96 – a good long life.  Though I have made fun of devotees of the monarch through the years, I do think she was a respectable person.  She did a lot of positive things for the world. So I tip my hat to her.  And really, when people think back on this day, they are going to remember it as an end of an era because of her death.  Maybe my story about trees will come in a close second?!