I haven't been blogging much in the last couple of months, because
I've been concen- trating on various other "projects" – not all
equally useful, I'm afraid to say. One chore that is useful, or at least
necessary, is leaf raking, and after putting it off about as long as I could, I
braved a gray drizzle today to get busy on the leaf litter in our yard.
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| The fruits of my labor. |
There
is a window of opportu- nity – only a few weeks – between when the last leaves
finally hit the ground and the first snowfall buries, some- times until the
spring thaw, whatever you haven't got around to raking yet.
In
reality, our leaf raking is not a big job. We have only four big trees (five if
you count our neighbor's maple, which drops a good portion of its bright yellow
leaves on our side of the line). The other four trees contributing to our leaf
litter are our apple tree, two birches and our venerable oak tree.
Luckily, the oak is still around. During some house construction a few
years back, it was dinged badly by a backhoes digger, and we thought we might
lose it.
I
especially prize the oak (tammi in
Finnish), because they are rare here. To think of an oak tree as exotic is
strange for someone like me who grew up in Georgia, where oaks (at least a
dozen different species) are found everywhere. Ubiquitous, you might
say. But here in Helsinki, we're right at the northern limit of the one oak species hardy enough to survive the Scandinavian climate.
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| The King's Oak. |
I live
near an area called Tammisto, which means "Oak Grove". Also not far
away is "The King's Oak", an ancient tree situated along the original
route of the "King's Road", a postal road laid out between Russia and
Norway in the 1300s. The King of
Sweden himself supposedly planted the oak tree some 300 years ago. Why he would do
that, I can't say, as this was way before "photo op" became practically
the only part of a royal's job description.
Our oak
is much, much younger than the King's, and with a much less impressive pedigree. But I'm happy to have at least one of its kind in our
yard, a small reminder of the more temperate lands where, (in my imagination, on
gray days like today) the sun is always shining.
