The Daily Brief

Summer has been mild here in South Texas, and so has the fall been: unnaturally so, for today it was into the 90ies, which made it necessary to turn on the air conditioning one more time. Usually it can be done without sometime in late September, or early October; the heat breaks and it is cool at night. It has been so mild, that the leaves on the trees are just beginning to fall; we haven’t had that prolonged cold snap that briskly reminds them that they need to be letting go and moving on, chop-chop. I trimmed one of the grapevines in front a couple of weeks ago… and the poor innocent thing is putting out new leaves already, under the delusion that winter has come and gone.

This has been truly the year of butterflies; they are everywhere, about the puddles and in the late afternoon a whole fair of them orbits the almond verbena. I have two, the size of small trees now, and the ends of the branches are hung with tiny white bracts that smell amazingly sweet on still air…is this fall, now, or is it already spring? We have two gardening seasons in Texas, and this is one of them. My favorite, as it happens. For the next six months, the weather will be lovely and mild— there may be a freeze or two, after Christmas, but nothing much to worry over, and in the meantime, there are butterflies. There are the little brown snout-somethings, but now we have monarchs, great lovely tiger-striped things and more than I have ever seen before, orbiting the buddleia bushes as if they can’t bear to tear themselves away, while the snout-somethings monopolize the verbena.

The sadness that we are supposed to feel in autumn for the end of all green and lovely things is focused this year on the street behind the neighborhood where I live. Stahl Road was a narrow strip of blacktop, a single lane in either direction, which for the longest time seems to have been no direction at all. There were empty fields on either side and deep grassy verges, and the backside of other developments. A couple of churches, the elementary school which is our polling place, and the high school which Blondie would have gone to if I hadn’t packed her off to the tender academic care of the scholar nuns of St. Francis, the site of a pumping station and water tower, a cluster of gas stations and little businesses at the intersections, and Ernie the Veggie Guy, selling produce off the end of his pick-up under the shade of a tree at the corner… not much traffic and all of that easily accommodated by a narrow back road, shaded with a double row of trees. But then one cross road was cut through all the way to the highway, and a couple of other developments went in, and the development we live in was extended all the way to Stahl Road, and an exit road cut through to it, and the traffic has been all too much for that poor little back-road. The City decreed months ago that Stahl Road was to be widened, but our rejoicing was mixed. The project would eliminate that place at the intersection of Stahl and O’Connor that accumulated a puddle of water the size of Lake Superior every time it rained… but it would cost us the trees that lined the roadway for most of it.

The trees would have to go; no two ways about it. Not enough space between them to accommodate two lanes-plus-center-turning lane, no way around that. And the trees were not the sort that people chain themselves to, or institute lawsuits about. They were not very well grown, or attractive trees, to be baldly truthful… not oaks or cypress or redwood, even, or very well grown or cunningly planted…just the usual sort of Texas trash-tree that sprouts wherever hedges have been, in a neat line along the verge, and making valiant attempts to meet in the center over the road and shading the sidewalk. They weren’t much but they were there and familiar most importantly, provided shade against the sun. This is a commodity rare and treasured in what is essentially a desert.

This week, the city crew came and worked their way along, felling every one of them, chopping the trunks into sections and methodically feeding the branches into a chipper. Another crew, with a small bulldozer, followed in their wake, grubbing up the roots and leveling the mounds on which the trees grew, and now it looks quite terribly bare and raw… and new. Another crew has been staging great piles of conduit; a second has been ripping up the sidewalks which had been previously built, and a third, relocating the utility poles to a position giving wider room to the new and wider roadway. The backsides of all those houses which were sheltered by the trees must be feeling their nakedness most particularly this week. It’s all going very fast, as these things happen in San Antonio, and our fear is that at some point all this work will stop and be held in stasis for a three or four years. The road looks so terrible without those trees, poor things that they were. I hardly know my own turn-in, without the row of spindly and yet valiant trees to guide me, after dark. All this week, Blondie and I have been thinking of this song, whenever we drove along this road:

“All the Birds in the forest they bitterly weep
Saying “where shall we shelter or where shall we sleep?”
For the Oak and the Ash they all cutten down
And the walls of Bonny Portmore are all down to the ground”

No, it wasn’t much of a forest, but we were used to it, and now it has been all cut down to the ground. Perhaps they will plant new, when they are done with it all… something sturdy, and fast-growing, and maybe as rich scented as the almond verbena trees.