#elm trees

"House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts c. 1915" - photo by Detroit Publishing Co.

"Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm."

Avenues of elm trees on the Boughton Estate  -  Walter Bonner Gash , n/d.

British,  1869 - 1928

I have just completed this painting which is my impression of how our house looked on a Christmas Eve in the 1950's. The car in the driveway is our 1951 (or was it '52?) Dodge Royale. The parrot in the window is Polly whom we inherited from Daddy's Godmother. His cage was perched on a radiator so he never seemed to be troubled by his location near the window.

The large gray tree on the left of the painting represents an American Elm. It truly was in the front yard of the house that was next door to ours, but in this painting I have replanted it nearer to our house so that I could pay homage to those wonderful huge trees. This one was at least 3 feet in diameter. Where they had been planted on either side of a street, their branches extended high above the sidewalks and pavement. When we walked underneath them, it was like walking through a very high tunnel. We lost all of our elms to the Dutch Elm Disease in the late 50's and early 60's.

People were just beginning to display outdoor Christmas lights in our small town during the years when we were growing up. Instead of the multicolored lights that were becoming popular, Mother substituted her own personal touch by buying strings of lights and replacing the many colored bulbs with these pale blue lights. In the years before my brothers were old enough to climb a ladder, she and Daddy themselves draped them along the evergreens in front of our house.

But our indoor tree (which was always too large for our living room) still had multicolored and bubble lights. The lights on the tree in our living room were only multicolored, that is, until the year (around 1955 I think) when Daddy walked past a store that was selling tiny clear lights that seemed to twinkle by blinking on and off in sequence. This was the first time that he (or any of us for that matter) had seen this new variation of holiday lights. That year, of course,our family had already spent hours hanging all the colored lights and decorations on our tree as usual. But Daddy, who always held on to his childlike view of Christmas, couldn't resist this new effect. He bought those new lights and secretly brought them home. On Christmas Eve that year, after we children had gone to bed, with Mother's loyal assistance, he painstakingly removed all the decorations and colored lights from our tree. Then they strung the tiny white lights on the denuded tree, rehung the colored lights over them and replaced all the ornaments so that they hung from the branches just as if they had never been moved.

My brothers and sister and I remember being stunned and enchanted by the magic of those twinkling lights that seemed to us had magically transformed our Christmas tree overnight.

They halted under an elm tree: its leaves though fast turning yellow were still thick, and the ground at its feet was fairly dry and sheltered.

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1 Chapter 3