The problem of humanity’s detachment occurs at exactly the moment
when our impact on the future of the planet is greater than ever before.
Against these trends, the loanword fotminne, or “foot memory” reminds
us of our primeval connections to the ground beneath our feet.
—Sofia Ahlberg, An Ecotopian Lexicon
Where I live in coastal Virginia, a mild February morning is the ideal time to resume the caretaking duties of a suburban yard. In this annual ritual, I slip my fingers into cool soil or stare at a bush until any necessary pruning reveals itself. I reconnect to living things, begin a new season in their company, relish the sun on the back of my neck. The year stretches ahead with its quotidian tasks, possibilities, and surprises.
I’d started that morning in the small bed of shrubs that surrounds the old loblolly pine by the street. Noticing a whitish slick on the barberry bush, I assumed it must be bird droppings. Perhaps the local great-horned owl, or even a great blue heron, had spent the night in the ragged, mammoth canopy of the pine. I discovered more sludgy deposits on the hollies. Make that two herons.
“What’s up, buddy?” I asked, glancing around to ensure no neighbors on the cul-de-sac were outside that morning to hear me talking, apparently to myself.
“Got some new birds?” I peered at the lowest branches, higher up than a flagpole.
A lone blue jay squawked and flew off to the pines next door. Still oblivious to anything amiss, I walked halfway around the tree and craned my neck. That’s when I saw it—an ugly jagged slash stretching fifteen feet or so down the north-west side, high in the crown. Sap dripped from the wound and streamed down the trunk. Tiny tear-like globs stuck in the crevices of the chunky bark.
“Ohmigod. You’re sick.” I stared at the laceration. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure this out,” I said, patting the trunk, more to re-assure myself than the tree. The bark’s crispy flakes came away on my hand.
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Thirty years ago, my husband, Rich, and I purchased a four-acre lot bordering a saltmarsh along the Chesapeake Bay—a perfect retirement-dream plot of land. In addition to the phragmite/spartina marsh, two wooded areas feature red maple, four varieties of oak, red cedar, black and sweet gum, plus wax myrtle, red bay, and holly in the understory. And loblollies. Dozens of them tower over the landscape, shedding billows of pollen in the spring and a minefield of cones throughout the year.
On our first sight of the land, a network of paths crisscrossing the overgrown field and woods revealed the wanderings and intentions of beings that had traversed the lot long before we found it. One led to a giant pine with a deer blind, and when Rich climbed its rickety slats up the trunk, he declared the resulting view of the marsh the end of our search. We built our house there, at the edge of the marsh, far from the street, snuggled into a space under the pines. The previous owner had cleared part of an acre near the street with plans for a house and lawn. I was relieved he had done the clearing; I still shudder remembering the craaaaaak and thunder of crashing limbs when, at six, I came upon the highway crew demolishing our family’s sentinel sugar maple.
Despite my aversion to cutting down trees, over the years we’ve removed plenty of them from the land. Yet, each time one falls, a tiny catch in my throat unsettles me. Encroachment, disease, and the death of a few black gums—not well-located for woodpecker trees—have necessitated removal. Hurricane Isabel, in 2001, downed eighteen trees, mostly hardwood. Since then, we’ve become friends with a local arborist, Lloyd, who I trust to know if and how a tree can be saved.
“Could be a lightning strike,” Lloyd said when he arrived a few days after I noticed the loblolly’s wound, “although I can’t imagine you didn’t hear it. That’s not from a dead branch falling, and I’m not seeing disease.”
Rich found us circling the nine-foot circumference, studying the gash, examining every possible angle.
“So, what do you think?” he asked. “You know she won’t want to take it down.”
“We’re not there yet. Let’s just keep an eye on it for a while.” Lloyd paused, eyeing the tree and then me.
“But at some point you might need to make a decision.”
Two months later, the lights in our kitchen began to flicker. Now and then the television dimmed. Pollen season arrived with its closed windows, and when the blades on the heating/air conditioning unit barely turned, we knew it was time for an electrician. He grimaced as he opened the electrical box. The sturdy red plastic plate covering the mechanism had melted around a gaping three-inch gouge, charred along its edges.
“You folks are lucky,” he said, handing Rich an estimate for our insurance. “That was one powerful surge of electricity.”
A lightning bolt? Could this be the work of the strike that might have seared the loblolly? Things started to make sense. It’s clear that we hadn’t been home. The charge would have traveled down the trunk into the roots, then surged more than a football field’s length as ground current, perhaps following water pipes, from the tree at the street to the electrical box—a blazing arc of scorching ions leaping from the ground to the side of our house.
I shuddered to shut the image from my mind—the bolt we never saw, the crash of thunder we never heard.
In a newfound preoccupation with the tree, I began more intentionally to make a daily walk to the place where it presides. In addition to checking on its progress, I felt an urge to be in its presence. I resist calling it “my” tree. In fact, I struggle with referring to the land or any living being as property—a problematic term that implies no agency or reciprocity. I began reading more about the relationship between humans and trees—David Haskell, Peter Wohlleben, Rebecca Solnit—that affirmed the kinship I felt with them as I walked the land, acknowledging the beings that by happenstance live here with us.
I also researched loblolly pine. There’s nothing remarkable about loblollies. Foresters lump them into the category of “yellow pine,” a group of species known for tall, straight trunks, rapid growth, and durable lumber with multiple construction uses. Opportunistic, springing up quickly in abandoned areas and old fields, they’re widely common in the southeastern United States.
The tree at the head of our driveway is, indeed, unremarkable. Certainly not a prize specimen, it lists about ten degrees to the south as though buffeted by unrelenting invisible winds. With its unruly canopy, worn bark, an occasional broken limb, and now an unsightly scar, a neighbor might refer to it as an eyesore. According to a quick online calculation, its nine-foot circumference and approximately 85-foot height equal an estimated age of 169 years. In fact, by entering those statistics into another online application, I’m informed that the tree may have come into being July 19, 1854. Along with the bizarre notion of a tree’s actual birthday, I was cautioned by Lloyd to take that as an approximate number of years, as the benchmarks for calculation may have been determined farther north where the growing season is much shorter. Even so, I hereby take back the “unremarkable” comment.
Eyesore or elder? If this tree has lived on this land since the mid 1800s, a decision to remove it was becoming even more complicated. To assume ownership seemed akin to hubris.
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The tool I use to weed under the pine belonged to my farfar (my father’s father in Swedish). It’s called a weeding spud—a thin steel blade, about eight inches long with a shallow V notched into the tip, and a smooth wooden handle. As I sit cross-legged in the dirt, jabbing at bittercress and deadnettle, I like to imagine it accompanying him on the long voyage from Sweden, safely wrapped in the single trunk he was allowed to carry.
Born as the seventh of nine children in a cottar’s cottage in rural Sweden, my farfar was a victim of the 19th century Swedish system of agricultural inheritance that bred generational poverty. His oldest brother, if he survived, stood first in line to inherit their father’s indentured status—the position on the farm, meager wages, rights to the family cottage, and the ability to grow the crops needed for his family’s survival. Younger sons were left to find opportunities elsewhere. To escape his limited options, my farfar earned passage to Amerika by tending the gardens of a nearby monastery.
I remember him as a great presence—large, taciturn yet jolly—then suddenly gone. In the pale, dry photographs that remain, he peers out over wire-rimmed glasses. A solemn, straight-set jaw belies a softness in his eyes. In one photo, he wears the uniform of a gentleman farmer—crisp white muslin shirt, cropped trousers, and a jaunty hat. Strong hands grip the handle of a rake.
Farfar was an estate gardener. He cared for the land of others—people of means who would pay a poor Swedish immigrant to till their soil, tend their gardens, prune their shrubs.
He never owned the land, but he loved it. He knew the plants—their Latin names and families, and how to care for them. He knew what would grow best in the rocky soil of New England or survive the harsh winters of western New York. He had the magic. In the lush gardens of that old photo album, all the roses thrive.
Perhaps it’s epigenetics, or merely family values passed generation to generation, but surely the deep connection to the land he shared with my father was passed on to my brother, sister, and me—a legacy of soil, landscape, plants, and beauty. If he were here, would my farfar cut down the tree?
If Dad were alive, I’d ask him about the tree. It’s not his pine or his landscape; his soil was the glacial moraine of northern lakes, and his conifers were hemlock and white pine. He never lived “in town” so his opinion wouldn’t be constrained by suburban thinking. But his love of the land and the growing things that live on it would transfer easily to my southern, coastal yard. Like his father, he wouldn’t need to own the land to love it. I don’t know if he talked to the plants he grew, but I saw him approach and touch them with familiarity, almost affection. I remember, as he walked through his one-acre garden, that his footsteps seemed to merge with the land as though a soft invisible force reached up from the ground to accompany him.
I’ve learned a beautiful word in Swedish, fotminne, that translates roughly as “foot memory.” Fotminne, as discussed by Sofia Ahlberg in her contribution to the collection An Ecotopian Lexicon, is a relationship to the land based on a connection of embodied memory. The expression reminds us that place and memory are intertwined, and that the ground—and its biotic community from microorganisms to plants—holds the memory of all who have walked there and the ways they changed it. But the concept also stretches to the future as our own travel over paths and open land reverberates in the earth. This encounter between foot and ground becomes a reciprocal relationship; with each step we awaken memory as well as create it. Like those who walked before me, I’m responsible for the impact of my own steps.
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So whose memories do I evoke as I walk this land by the Bay? Whose memory does our family of white-tail deer follow as they crunch their way through the narrow path that rims the marsh? And do the owners of those memories have a say about this ailing tree?
I struggle with the question. My perception is limited to my own imagination, but I do know that the Kecoughtan People lived throughout this peninsula bordered by the Chesapeake Bay and the York and James Rivers. My only access to their history comes from recorded observations/impressions of their colonizers, and the interpretations of scholars studying the remnants of their lives.
I can find no records of indigenous settlements in my neighborhood, which is now called Fox Hill; the known Kecoughtan village stood about five miles to the south. But indigenous people would have walked this land—harvesting oysters in the tidal creek, fishing in the bay, hunting the fields and woods for fox, deer, opossum, and turkey. If some did settle here, they would have found rich, sandy, clay soil to plant the three sisters: squash, maize, and beans. Like me, they likely marked the seasons by the shifts of the winds, the arrival and departure of the great egrets in the marsh.
By the early 1600s the Kecoughtan People were forcibly overtaken by Wahunsonacock (known to us as Powhatan) and his Algonquin federation, and their numbers severely diminished. Enough of them remained to gain the dubious distinction of greeting the first English would-be settlers before they sailed up the James River to Jamestown. One colonist noted, “we were never more merry nor fed on more plenty of good oysters, fish, flesh, and wild fowle and good bread, nor never had better fires in England than in the dry smoky houses of Kecought[e]n.”
Not long after, as immigrant settlement increased in the area, colonizers burned the indigenous village and slaughtered the people.
Yet their memory lives on this land; their steps were light, they disturbed little, they took only what was needed. Perhaps I sense their code of stewardship as I debate the fate of the loblolly pine.
The ancestors of the lightning-struck pine would have been part of a land grant sometime around 1625 when plots of 50 acres were “given” to each person arriving from England, or even more if they were established residents performing “many services to the Colony.”
At first, small groups of colonizers lived along the creeks and inlets of this watery world. As the area developed, much of the land remained in its natural state as most of the “owners” lived in town—the outskirts considered too wild and vulnerable to attacks by pirates and Indians—so their land was hunted or farmed by their tenants and slaves. They called the area Fox Hill, erasing the earlier name of Indian Springs.
In a land of ever-changing water and shoreline, the early maps are difficult to compare with current topography. The creek between our house and the Bay, called Long Creek, appears as a prominent feature and was used as far back as 1628 to describe boundaries. By the 1800s, the land of Indian Springs—originally owned by no one, yet stewarded by everyone—was now property to be divided, deeded and disputed. It appeared to change ownership easily—hand to hand, family to family.
If I overlay a current map on one from 1890, I can somewhat plot the acreage we live on as part the Topping Tract, a corner of the estate of wealthy landowner RH Watson, but there is no record of a dwelling. Many Fox Hill residents of the time, including members of the Topping family who lived closer to the village, were watermen and boatbuilders. The largest trees currently part of my landscape were saplings then. In addition to harvesting some of the loblollies for building, the Toppings may have used the land for fruit trees, sweet potatoes, and strawberries, as it sits too close to the Bay for the preferred crops of tobacco and cotton. So this land may have been spared the ravages of clearcutting and monoculture. It may have even sat fallow—free to the deer and other wanderers—during the time from its sale by the Toppings to the Copelands in 1916, until it was parceled for development in 1985.
And what of the Toppings and their contemporaries? What fotminne remains with the land after their occupation? What advice from them does my footfall across the yard solicit about a single loblolly pine? Would they see it as merely one of thousands of loblollies springing up in a soil that encouraged their rapid growth only to be cut down for flooring or doors?
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We confirmed the lightning strike theory with Lloyd on his next visit when we talked more about the pine. Again we circled the old tree, tapped its trunk, peered at the wound. Finding no fresh sap or fallen limbs, he was optimistic. But the question remained: Is it best to cut down the tree?
By this time, I had engaged many of the neighbors in my dilemma.
“Cut it!” said one. “Those damn yellow pine are just weeds.” The tone he used to say yellow pine didn’t feel like one he would use to say blue spruce. He added, “When they get old like that, they’re nothing but a mess.”
“It’s not as bad as my sweet gum,” said the guy next door. “I hate that thing.”
From the neighbor who always parks on the street in front of the tree: “I hope it falls on my truck. I need to get rid of it.”
And a nurseryman in the business of selling trees, not saving them: “Don’t feel guilty about cutting down a tree. They’re not your children.”
I wondered if I was making too much of this decision. What was my responsibility to the tree? I decided to ask.
I approached the tree timidly. Nothing in my experience ever taught me how to seek counsel from a loblolly pine. Again, not wanting to be seen as the crazy woman who talks to her pine tree, I brought my weeding spud and pruning tools in their ratty bushel basket and positioned myself on the rock that sits on the tree’s north side behind the large cleyera bush. From there I could see the remnants of the long, deep wound.
“Hey buddy. How’re you doing today? Are you healing, or is there something inside we can’t see?”
Instead of continuing my usual chatter, I sank into my seat and the surprisingly uncomfortable silence. I wanted an answer this time. How would I hear it?
“I need your help to decide what to do.”
More silence, except for a squirrel scritching around somewhere up in the canopy.
“If you’re going to die soon, I don’t want you to suffer anymore.”
Wait a second. Who was I talking to now? My Dad? My farfar? My childhood sugar maple?
I felt that familiar catch in my throat, that brief separation of my breath from myself. But this, I realized, wasn’t so much about felling a tree. This was about the role I found myself in; it was my decision to sanction its death.
I looked out over the front yard, the view when we drive down the street to our house. For the past thirty years—more than a fifth of its life—this tree has stood sentinel to our four acres. It’s no longer in a forest; it lives on developed land, alone except for the shrubbery beneath it. I have no way of knowing, but the network of water pipes the lightning strike followed may be stronger than the tree’s underground mycelium network that connects to its fellow pines thirty or more yards away. It might have missed entirely the emergency nutrients and support they must have sent following the storm. Yet this solitary tree absorbed a lightning hit and may have saved our house. How long can it hold its post?
Here was the reciprocity. And the tension. In my 21st century suburban world, what does it mean to honor a tree? There’s no formula to calculate the impact of its removal from the landscape on the beings around it—me, the blue jay and owl, the insects in the trunk, the two doe posing like lawn art nearby, the complex underground world beneath us. We’re all in this together.
I felt the fotminne stretch far back to the Kecoughtan People, and yet forward to the time I might remain living on this land, even beyond. Perhaps the foot memory is strong here, not complicated by hordes of people and traffic. As one of this land’s few human residents, my impact felt potentially strong. Altering.
Perhaps, I thought, we all can be here a while.
The squirrel, having completed its business above me, scurried across the driveway and the yard was silent.
Once again, I patted the crusty bark of the venerable tree.
“Thanks for the company,” I said. “We’ll talk again soon.”
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Sentinel, I’ve learned, has another definition used in medicine: something that acts as an indicator of the presence of disease. This damaged sentinel pine appears to be healing. Does that bode well for the health of the land where it stands? Could my decisions, at the least, help keep this land healthy, and, at best, support and nurture the beings with whom I currently share it? Will the tree and the land remember this affirmation of continuing life?
I’ve been perusing the online projected sea level rise maps. When global temperatures rise 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the four-acres I now occupy along the Chesapeake Bay will be under water. I won’t live to see that day, but I wonder how long I will be part of this place. Rich and I, as we age, debate the question of when a house and a plot of land become too much to manage. But what happens to the soil, to the pine and the squirrel, to the marsh and the egrets when we leave?
Stretching backward and forward in time, I still don’t know who “owns” this land, or the soil, or trees, or critters that live here. When I walk, I may be connected to a host of human beings from indigenous people to watermen to slaves to hunters and developers, as well as generations of other beings from ticks to foxes and white-tailed deer. Each step and each decision I make also leave my mark on this place. How many human and other shoulders do I stand on to see the landscape of my responsibilities?
Since the time of land grants when the ground became property, its boundaries, amount of acreage, and dwellings were defined for ownership and purchase. But what else comes with a deed? How will Rich and I relinquish our felt responsibilities for the totality of this place at the time of closing a sale? How can we extend a fotminne of stewardship?
I’m imagining a clause at the end of the contract: The washer and dryer convey, as does the loblolly pine at the head of the driveway.
Or perhaps I’ll prepare a welcome book for the new owner. Following the list of resources like electrician and plumber, and instructions for the appliances, I’d create a special page:
Thanks for buying our house and the surrounding acreage that is home to a variety of plants and animals. You have joined a long line of stewards of this land. It has a life of its own, distinct from us and you and anyone else who will choose to live here. Please love it and honor the ghost-feet that walk it. And keep your eye on the old pine at the head of the driveway that has suffered a severe injury. If you’re inclined to celebrate, its birthday is calculated as July 19, 1854.
CINDY CARLSON grew up in the snowbelt of western New York. When not traveling and birding with her husband, she has spent most of her adult life along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. After a long career in youth development, she is enjoying retirement as a writer. Winner of the Hampton Roads Writers contest for creative nonfiction and co-founder of the local chapter of Women Who Submit, Cindy is active on the Board and writes grants for The Muse Writers Center. Her work has appeared in The Wayfarer, Tiferet, Solstice, Chautauqua, Barely South Review, and The Common.
