ELMS

Long ago, in Michigan.

“What are they doing?” Barbara asked her mother.

“They are taking out the elm trees.”

When she looked at the pretty American elm trees she couldn’t see anything to dislike about them. “Why are they doing that?”

“Because soon they will get sick with Dutch Elm Disease.”

Ah, what we remember sixty years latr. What we miss. My Connecticut elms were also stately and my mother also wept.

The neighbors' Dad had hung a plank-seated swing on ropes from a sturdy elm branch on the noblest elm in Middle Haddam. He pushed us hard out over the downhill slope, thirty feet, forty or more above the wild pasture, it seemed. So high at the apogee the ropes softened and our fannies lifted off the seat. We screamed. Yet our Mothers never objected.

There was never a swing like that again.