Heading into our short Fourth of July vacation a year ago, I spent quite some time studying a way to portray a gnarled and rugged looking old maple tree on the farm where I was raised. Despite its age the old maple keeps hanging on, for it was an old tree when I was a kid some 70 years ago.

For a brief period of that time one of the limbs held a rope swing. On hot, humid summer afternoons, hay crews would wander across the lawn to lay in the shade after one of my mother’s incredible meals … fried chicken or braised roast beef, mashed potatoes with thick, rich gravies, and typically one of her delicious fruit pies. Long before air conditioning, this was as cool as we would be from the dews of dawn toward the setting of the evening sun.

While from the distance it appears to be rather healthy, for the limbs are still flush with leaves, a closer look gives evidence of how the years have created deep scars, a hollowed and rotted out trunk, all of which has given the old tree reverence and character. For all practical purposes the tree is ageless, for there is no possible way to determine its actual age.

Here’s the skinny on trees, be they old and aged like our marvelous maples, or young sapling searching for space in the heavens. Only the outside layers of a tree are “living.” An incredibly small lifeline begins with the cambium layer located just inside the bark, which producers new wood and layers of bark. Adjacent to the cambium is another near microscopic layer called the phloem, which has the task of transporting the sugars created through photosynthesis from the crown to the roots.

Those layers, combined as less than the width of the tiniest sewing needle, is the lifelines for that old tree and two other very old maples on our adjacent farm place.

Those two less than a quarter miles away at the the old farm house where my nephew’s family now resides, perhaps dates back to the 1860s. That’s when the farm came into the family originally, and It’s where we lived until I was 10. It was there this past Fourth of July that I began nosing around looking at these equally old maples. Between his remodeled old house, incredible landscaping and a strikingly nice machine shed was our first “swing tree.” Yes, another aged maple with amazing character. It stands like the other maple, with grace and beauty, with stoic stubbornness fighting the fate of time.

A third old maple stands between the two. Never a swing nor shade tree, because until my nephew removed a fence to add more yard for his family of six, that tree was just that … nestled tightly against the fence. Storms and time haven’t been so kind to this third tree, for many of the stately limbs have broken away. What I found as neat, though, was that the roots at the base seem to have formed dinosaur “toes” over the years.

Yes, I’ve been accused of having a vivid imagination. So be it. That old beast of a maple needs to have some sort of striking feature since it has spent its life sequestered with a neighboring elm that I climbed one extremely hot and humid afternoon to jump up and down on a supple branch within the canopy with such energy that my alarmed mother came running from the house with absolute worry of what her young son was doing.

This was in the late 1940s, back in the polio scare, which caused her to be on pins and needles about her children’s health anyway. And, may I once again add, long before air conditioning. “I knew how hot and uncomfortable you were, Mom, so I’m’ trying to start a breeze!”

With the patience that made her such a great teacher and mother, she explained that despite my efforts it was highly unlikely that I alone could create a calming breeze regardless of how hard I tried or even how necessary it seemed. 

That elm, like the dinosaur-toed neighbor, that tired old maple, still lives. Both show their age.

All three of the old maples are identified as sugar maples, although my guess is that capturing the sap for syrup might be impossible. Even if it was possible, i would hesitate simply because I would be more interested in seeing them continue to live a long and breezy life.

If you suggested that maples are among my favorite tree species you would be correct, for we grew up swinging and having dreams of building tree houses on those stout and staunch limbs. That they’re still alive is both heartening and reassuring; that despite age there is still a good life and beauty. Yes, those three trees were old when I was a child, and I’m now 80. My guess is that one if not all are twice that age, for I’ve never not known them as being small and supple. I would venture to guess they were planted before my father was a boy, and perhaps when his father was one. 

Making the long drive from Listening Stones to my childhood home is a long eight to nine hour drive, yet there is little that makes me feel more at home nor welcomed than seeing those old maples. Old friends that they are. The two have shaded men and machine through the ages of that farm, and would today if modern machinery would fit beneath the limbs. Looking at the trees it doesn’t take much imagination to wonder if the trunks will eventually split completely apart, or that one of the usual ice storms coming to northeast Missouri winters will destroy the limbs or even the trees themselves.

Yet, they keep hanging on, those marvelous maples, using that microscopic thread of life to bring forth a new year of large pointy leaves and beauty beyond shade. Weakened, yet strong. Old, yet bold. Gnarled, yet stately. Like old friends, they’re our maples and we share a joy of living a long and wonderful life. And as I bring this to a close, I’ll extend special kudos to my nephew for leaving them be despite their imperfections.