“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”– Kahlil Gabran
Aging My Way
I’ve long been an avid fan of Georgia O’Keefe’s art, and was thrilled when I visited her namesake museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. But I’ve never visited the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, just an hour and half away from the museum in Taos, where Georgia’s painting, The Lawrence Tree, hangs.
She and Lawrence were friends and the painting of the large Ponderosa Pine symbolizes the tree that the author sat beneath to write. I hadn’t even known such a painting existed until I read about it this morning in The New York Times Cultured Traveler: 100 Trips for Curious Minds from Agadir to Yogyakarta, a book that attracted my attention on a recent trip to the library.
But now, as a long-time tree hugger, The Lawrence Tree has become my favorite O’Keefe painting. The artist herself described it as: “a fitting and generous tribute to the author whose legacy she had become heir to.”
About the tree, which he sat beneath to write, Lawrence wrote: “The big pine tree in front of the house, still and unconcerned and alive…the overshadowing tree whose green top one never looks at… One goes out of the door and the tree-trunk is there, like a guardian angel.”
Lawrence must have felt the same love for his tree as I do about the tall Cottonwood – so out-of-place from its native home near some creek or river – that shades my one-bedroom apartment and small patio yard. So how could I not write about it.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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