About Time Press 2009
Paperback, 132 pages, $14.95
Do rocks like becoming stone walls?
If you listen carefully enough, trees speak (or sometimes whisper) or even just stand there looking at plenty of human folly around them, according to Linda Tatelbaum.
As a back-to-the-land homesteader, and later a professor at Colby, she and her husband planted themselves in midcoast Maine in the late 1970s, building a house, living off the grid, and fighting a battle with critters that saw their garden as a snack bar.
Woman Who Speaks Tree follows her memoir, Carrying Water, and firmly places trees as the observers of and strength-givers for her life’s major events-building a house, having a child, the aging and death of her parents, and her role in academia.
In the 1970s, Tatelbaum and her husband show up at writer-farmer Wendell Berry’s door in Kentucky (whom they don’t know from Adam) saying, “‘We read in the Mother Earth News that West Virginia and Kentucky are good for what we want to do. Small farm, small house, you know,'” they stammer. Berry replies, “‘Go back and settle where you come from. That’s what I did.'” They head back to New Hampshire and eventually Maine.
Here is Tatelbaum’s candor about wanting to go back to the land in the Erewhon whole food days: “Each in our own way, we are going in reverse to a backwards nowhere that probably doesn’t exist.”
She writes in a philosophical and eloquent way about the lessons and healing that land, trees, and sky offer us, as well as concretely describing hassles with building a house when you don’t quite know what you’re doing (the book’s most humorous part in which carpenter friends come to the rescue), canning pears, or fighting a battle to save campus beech trees targeted to be cut down.
About the old homestead fallen into disrepair that she and her husband “restore” she asks, “But who says productivity and order restore this land to what it should be? Monarch butterflies preferred the milkweed we uprooted. Porcupines, skunks, woodchucks, slugs, mice, are persecuted pests now. Pine saplings born to reach for the sky are yanked in favor of tomatoes and lettuce. ‘Sorry,’ I say when I do it. But does that makes it okay?”
One of the best aspects of Tatelbaum’s writing is her ability to take on the “mentality” of rocks, trees, plants, and animals, pondering what they might want in the face of what we humans think is best. She wonders if the rocks being removed from a neighboring property and trucked elsewhere like being “reincarnated” as beautiful stone walls.
Writing about her Colby College course, “Land and Language,” and about what matters most to her: “I’m finally authorized to speak about life on the land [after publishing Carrying Water]-to grapple with this niggling question of what belongs and what is imposed, what is wild and what is tame.”
A few surprises in Woman Who Speaks Tree are the chapters on the illness and death of her parents and about her Jewish heritage. While these chapters are both heart wrenching and humorous, the thread of trees doesn’t seem to tether them well enough to the rest of the book.
So while trees watch, Tatelbaum’s book connects us well to her life on the land in Maine and, ultimately, to universal questions of how natural elements affect us, and how we affect them.