“--- a poem lovely as a tree,” that’s how Joyce Kilmer finished the last sentence in his poem “Trees.” Recently, that poem was brought to mind as I read an Arbor Day Foundation request for a contribution. It was for funds to help in the planting of new seedlings. And if you think only of those trees lost to forest fires, the building of new homes and to the manufacture of paper products, the request seems to have been a reasonable one.

Like so many of us, I wandered about the neighborhood as an elementary student, collecting and identifying the autumn leaves on the tall area trees that grew there and was amazed at what I learned. Not only were those leaves different and beautiful, depending upon which tree they came from, but my classmates and I also learned that those oversized plants helped to purify the very air we breathed.

We learned that some of the area’s trees, the conifers, remained green all year long, while others, the deciduous, lost their leaves each autumn and grew new ones each spring. We learned more about food bearing trees too. While we knew about most of the ones that bore fruit, those that produced nuts were a surprise as well as the maples that provided syrup, perhaps the earliest of the sweeteners that we take for granted today.

As the earth completes another revolution around the sun, mankind seems to have become a bit more sophisticated about the environment and about how we need to take steps to protect it. The international gathering in Copenhagen has at least brought about a consensus that steps need to be jointly taken to reverse the earth’s warming trend.

While individually we can do little to solve the problem, we can each do small things in our homes and with our lifestyles and willingly support some of the bigger things our leaders decide, even if they tend to cost a bit of money and perhaps require minor changes in energy usage and methods of manufacturing. We don’t know the extent of the needs that the scientific community is dealing with.

This morning there was a crowd of birds around the feeder. In waves they blew in and out from the limited perching areas, a feathery contrast to the swinging, brick red feeder, the softly falling snow and the row of green pines behind. It struck me that they looked like shoppers entering and exiting the mall in Christmas time frenzy.

And they were as varied as mall shoppers too. The sparrows of course dominated the numbers, rounded, brown and tan and white, hopping, pecking and chirping both on the edge and in the snow below the feeder.

Chickadees in their dress of black and blue and white, clung to the places where others couldn’t hold, their cheerful voices brightening the sounds at the scene. They’d wait their turn, grab a seed and dart off to some private place to eat. And in a moment they’d rejoin the mob.

Cutting your own Christmas tree is traditional!

Around the northern and the agricultural regions of our country the bringing in of the evergreen at Christmas time was always a holiday highlight.  Ask some of the seniors in your family or your area about that activity and be ready for a parade of happy stories.

Many will relate that little was said about the procurement of a tree ahead of time.  Little was said and little was asked, although Dad and often big brother, too, had provided for that part of the family Christmas.  Perhaps months before, walks had been taken into the hills after chores had been completed and a perfect pine selected for cutting later on.