These huge plane trees line the street where Katonah Avenue meets Kimball Avenue -- a sort of not-too-sure if it's Yonkers or Woodlawn zone, but the old trees and the old houses make for lovely scenery:

Plane Trees

Joyce Kilmer's poem Trees used to be memorized by every school child. Most today have never heard the whole poem:

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.

But I often find myself thinking, as more and more of the trees of Woodlawn fall to the tree butchers hired by the utility companies, of the poem of Ogden Nash:

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.

I understand the necessity of trimming and cutting diseased trees, of clearing dead or damaged branches... but some of the mangling of the trees that goes on in Woodlawn is a downright disgrace. Here's a prime example:

Katonah deformity

If this tree makes it through another winter, it will be astounding to me. It's been trimmed so hard that it is lopsided and the water seeps into the places where it was cut, and freeze and expand and contract so that the branches become brittle and get wet and diseased. I'll be sorry when it goes.

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