Homecoming. (SEPTEMBER 2023 CHAIR'S COLUMN)

Our house is very old. Well, relatively old – there may be many of you with older houses.  Ours was built in either the 1880’s or 1906, depending on who you ask.  It’s like all old houses – we love it because it has character, but that’s another way of saying that there is always something to fix.

We have a Cedar tree growing in our front yard.  By all accounts, the tree has been here since the house was built.  Soon after we moved into the house in 2000, we had a visit from Mr. Lannie Lee, one of our neighbors. Mr. Lannie was 79 years old when he visited us, still farming just down our road.  As we were visiting, he looked up at the cedar tree and told us a story of his father in the 1920’s.  His daddy worked for the phone company, Mr. Lannie said, and he was called to this house one day to crawl underneath and work on a phone line.  Lannie was a small boy then, and his father told him to stay in the truck until he was finished.  Lannie got impatient and decided to ignore his father’s directive, opening the truck door and falling to the ground, breaking his arm.  As he finished telling his story, Mr. Lannie said “I fell just under that cedar tree – it was a lot smaller then.” Mr. Lannie died 17 years later, at 96 years old.

I think about Mr. Lannie whenever I look at that tree. I think about watching the moon rise over it from time to time, or the limbs bending whenever tropical weather comes our way.  I think about how we’ve harvested cuttings from that tree to decorate during the holidays, and how the branches stay green during the winter. I think about how our cedar tree is about the same height as our house, and how it stands just close enough to protect the folks inside. Just this week, the cedar was the target of some high school seniors during Homecoming week. Our cedar looks great covered in toilet paper.

We found out last week that our cedar tree is dead, beyond hope of being revived.  As I type this column, I’m watching a crew cut our tree down to keep it from falling on our house or causing any other damage. 

We had a cedar tree.  I think we’ll plant another one.

See you in Savannah.