Æ, the Letter Ash
Once, there was a tree in the English alphabet: the second letter was named ash, short for ash tree. If you were inking a calfskin, graving a whalebone, noting the medicinal properties of sur-æpples (crab apples), you would have written ash by uniting a and e in a ligature like this: æ. In his book Clash of Symbols: A Ride Through the Riches of Glyphs, Stephen Webb says that the letter ash was one of the few native letters, an Anglo-Saxon rune that the scribes carried over while adapting the Roman alphabet that they learned from Christian missionaries.
The æsc (ash) tree was felled for spear handles, tablets, charcoal, bedframes, wagon wheels, oars — perhaps this is why the author of the Old English “Rune Poem” in the eighth century observes that the æsc is precious, although many men attack it. You might see traces of the letter æsc (ash) in archaeologists, who find lathed ash bowls at Coppergate, or in aeon, a long period of time, or in Caedmon, the cowherd and first named poet in English.
You might see proof that some ligatures persist, can still make connections, like religion, like ligaments, the stuff that sews together our bones.
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Once, on my grandparents’ farm, Yorks were the apples — hard, tart, red — that grew on the tree down below the silo toward the woods. And on the side of the knob, shading another cow pasture, the August Sweet tree, its apples soft and pale gold. They were there when I was a boy. Those trees that I loved, grandfather, grandmother, all gone now. If nobody can return them to me, I’ll pull them from the gray air word by word, the jagged shapes of several stumps, and petals in the grass, and yellowjackets working the groundfalls, chewing into bruised apples. And will reach with both hands until I see again his straw hat and mud boots, he’s splashing his pie with cream from the Guernsey, thinking about what he’ll store for winter, the long-lasters, the keepers. And will dream back her rolling pin and paring knife, peels she dropped in the sink, she’s singing an old friend I happened to see, her hands coring, quartering, now she’s taking the pan from the low blue flame, pushing the cooked chunks through the ricer. In Old English, æppel screada were apple peels; scread was a shred, scrap, fragment, crumb of holy bread.
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Once, the Braun sisters traveled the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee by Model T, on foot, by logging train. Mountain people called them the plant ladies. Lucy drove the car and studied remnants of untouched forests — the hardwoods, shrubs, and beds of ferns; her sister Annette made sandwiches for their lunches, studied moth larvae, leaf miners. Wherever Lucy went, Annette went. They lived together all their lives. Annette was five years older, but Lucy was the boss. Lucy wanted to survey, describe, photograph the old trees still standing — as she put it — three hundred years after the white man had started on his era of forest destruction on the Atlantic seaboard. She would call the book she was writing Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America. Sometimes, Lucy and Annette drove to the end of a washed-out road, picked their way up a steep trail, at last reached a stand of centuries-old, gloriously tall yellow poplars or beech trees, then did their observations, all the while absorbing the beauty — not long before the lumber company came in, felled all the trees, laid waste. The word deciduous comes from dēciduus, tending to fall, falling, hanging down, in post-classical Latin also fleeting, transitory.
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Once, the Virginia spiraea, also called meadowsweet, could be seen blooming from the cracks in boulders along creeks, from gravel bars in the Blue Ridge. Member of the rose family, Virginia spiraea relies on flooding, regenerates from roots that remain stuck in the rocks after a flood. To protect a threatened population growing near the Cheoah River, volunteers use loppers to cut invasive vines, use weed-wrenches to expose the root-crowns of kudzu, to extract the root-balls of privet. The word spiraea comes from the Latin root word spīræa, meaning spire, meaning a winding line like the thread of a screw.
Once, the sicklefin redhorse was an important food for the Cherokee, a suckerfish that they smoked, dried, made into soup. Dumped oil and fertilizer run-off pollutes its home waters in the Hiwassee system. To study the sicklefin redhorse, to re-establish populations in creeks where they once lived, Cherokee scientists collect sicklefin eggs, raise them in hatcheries. They catch wild adults with fyke nets, tag them with microchips, catch them again the next spring, and snip tissue samples from their pectoral fins, store the snippings in coin envelopes. The Cherokee word for sicklefin redhorse is jungihtla, meaning wears a red feather.
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Once, my wife gave my son a toy chainsaw for Easter. When I parked in our driveway near the Leyland cypresses, he surprised me: he gleefully blurted, cut down wild trees, and his glee spread to me: I thought, yes, a four-word sentence (his slow acquisition of language had me counting every word). And then I thought, let him be saw-delighted, machine-delighted, but let him also be nature-delighted. On my laptop, we watched Mr. Rogers show a potted juniper, one-and-a-half years old, he said, evergreen, always green.
I take the boy to Red Clay State Park, fifteen miles from our house: last seat of Cherokee government, the park’s website reports, where the Trail of Tears began in 1838, where the Cherokee learned they had lost their mountains, streams, and valleys forever. We cross through the powwow grounds, where I heard Cherokee women sing their old songs last summer. As we walk the Council of Trees Trail, the boy examines sticks, rocks, fallen logs.
Near the Blue Hole, shaded by sourwoods, we cool our feet in water the blue of twilight, the blue of slate. We share a Gala apple. The boy offers me the core. You like bones, he says.