Jess' Journeys // I want to live under the live oaks
You know what my hometown is seriously lacking? Live oaks. We have two fairly famous ones though. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Toomers oaks. In the last few years, they’ve attracted a lot of attention, and not necessarily in the best way. The way I remember them though is these giant trees on the corner of downtown Auburn where everyone gathers to celebrate all sorts of things.
I guess my favorite memories with the Toomers oaks should all be about rolling them after wins, right? That’s only a little bit of it. I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve met up with friends under the oaks before we did something in downtown Auburn. It was always the easiest place to wait on people without feeling pushed into buying something in a store/restaurant. I remember drunkenly trying to learn how to hula hoop from girls with light-up hoops. I remember that in the fall of 2010 as my world was crashing around me, the Toomers oaks were always there, and they always gave a reason to celebrate.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE rolling the Toomers oaks when Auburn wins. I’ve been there for some pretty epic wins too. I was there when the “one second” Ironbowl game happened. I was there when Auburn won the national championship the 2010 season. I’ve been there after landslide victories and tight margins. I’ve been there when the Ironbowl was an away game and the only people in town were locals, a true family feeling.
If there were a real “giving tree” ala Shel Silverstein, it would definitely be one of the Toomers oaks. These fellas were planted somewhere between 1937 and 1939. Since the old adage goes that live oaks spend 100 years growing, 100 years living, and 100 years dying, these bad boys had lots of life left in them. To say that I took the poisoning at the end of the 2010 season a little hard might be a bit of an understatement. I got drunk and mourned the loss of these huge parts of my life with lots of other people who had their own connections to the Toomers oaks.
You might could say that I have a pretty good relationship with trees. I’m not going to be chaining myself to one to avoid it being cut down anytime soon, but I’m rather fond of them. They find themselves intertwined in random parts of my life.
When I was growing up, we drove to my grandparents’ house about every other weekend. My absolute favorite part of the drive was this little chunk of roadway where the trees hand over the road. During the fall it’s pretty, but during the spring when all of the leaves fill the branches and the grass in the surrounding fields is the brightest green, that’s when it really shines. That little stretch of road was a place where I just felt like I could breathe, and it it was always over way too quickly. There’s a part of my daily commute that has trees over the road, and there’s just a certain stillness that it brings me when I let myself take them in.
I also remember climbing into the peach tree in my backyard just to hangout (I plead the fifth on spying on my neighbors from it) and climbing into my grandfather’s plum trees to eat them. I obviously never died from the pesticides, even though he warned me not to eat the plums.
When my friend Kayla moved to Mobile, AL, a few years ago, she very quickly learned the easiest way to make me like her new home. As she was trying to persuade me to move down there, she kept taking me down roads that had huge live oaks covered in Spanish moss that hang over the road. This was a smart decision.
Visiting southeast Georgia was NOT a smart decision. Have you seen pictures of Cumberland Island, St. Simon’s Island, or the Wormsloe Plantation? ALL. THE. TREES. I almost never came home. I fell in love. There’s actually a print of the Wormsloe Plantation’s oak alley hanging over my fireplace right now.
If I ever own a house with the space to support it, I want to plant a live oak tree, maybe one of the Toomers oaks decedents, so that I can have one of my very own. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to continue visiting them throughout the southeast.
