Sycamore trees have distinctive bark. It has a mottled appearance that makes those unfamiliar with sycamores wonder after the health of the tree. As there are a lot of sycamores in our neighborhood, all of which seem to be thriving, we have ample opportunity to admire them. Their bark isn’t as elastic as the bark of most trees. It can’t stretch much to accommodate the increasing girth of the trunk and branches as they grow. Instead, the bark splits here and there under the strain, and sections of it fall to the ground.
Householders tidy up their lawns around their sycamores, of course, but it’s an ongoing process. You’re rarely hard pressed to find sheets of bark under a sycamore tree, around the trunk and at least as far out as its branches spread. The range of bark dispersion is so great that it makes you wonder whether the trees don’t send the pieces flying off into space, like little explosions.
Especially after rainstorms, which seem to swell the size of sycamores all at once, like big drinks of water, pieces of bark come off sycamores pell-mell and willy-nilly. I’ve wanted to see it happen for all the time we’ve lived here. And now I have. The dog and I were walking down the street when something drifted to the grass next to a sycamore. It fell gently, the way a leaf would, but turned out to be a section of bark. Nothing dramatic. Quite peaceful, actually. It was fun to see it happen.
Sue and I were out walking this afternoon and headed for the boardwalk that overlooks the pond along Barclay. To our surprise, it was being rebuilt, so we headed toward Oakwoods Nature Area, which adjoins Barclay. We were just stepping into the woods when another lady out walking approached us with a question. Were we about to walk the length of the woods? she wanted to know.
Yes, we assured her. She said she’d like to follow us, just as we invited her to join us. She told us her name was Nezuko and that she didn’t like to walk through the Oakwoods by herself. The park is fairly remote.
We all introduced ourselves and set off through the woods. During the transit, we taught her how to recognize shagbark hickory trees and mayapples. Yes, we told her, you can eat the fruit of mayapples, although it’s small and most people don’t. More important, hickory trees bear delicious nuts. You can just pick up the nuts in the fall? she wondered. Yes, but so can the squirrels, and they’re in the woods all day every day. We had a lovely time in Oakwoods with Nezuko.
She clearly spoke at least two languages, although the subject didn’t come up. Last night, however, my husband and I spoke with a woman who speaks at least four. She emigrated to the United States from Macedonia as a teenager. Then, on a visit to Macedonia to see her family, she met a man visiting Macedonia from Germany. They fell in love and married, and she followed him back to West Berlin, where he worked. They lived there for three years, and she became fluent in German. Then the two of them and their baby girl moved to the US, where they stayed, and added a son to the family.
“We married forty-eight years ago,” she said. “I saw something in him. I thought, I will be happy with him. My children will be happy with him. And I was right. And when I told him I wanted us to move to the United States, he said that was all right with him, because we would be happy together anywhere. And he was right.”
She added that she speaks Turkish as well, because a lot of the kids she played with spoke Turkish. And a smattering of Greek and Albanian. Also, her husband was pretty good at Danish, because he worked with a lot of Danish people in West Berlin. She said that, where she grew up, people routinely spoke five or six languages.
Our polyglot French teacher Molly, a British emigree, tells us that Americans are the only group of people she has run into who tend to voice a belief that they have no aptitude for languages. She herself has studied something like sixteen, often in countries where the languages are spoken. And, do you know what? Molly loves not just the sound of all those languages, the greater understanding and ease of communication that comes from knowing them, she loves the grammar in each and every one of them!
30 May 2025