Growing up on Chatham Street in New Haven, Connecticut, Mom loved her “little room.”

Nowadays, we might call it a walk-in closet. Back in the 1940s, it was a room with a window and a desk. For writing, for studying, for dreaming.

Even more special was the view. The window looked out into the front yard, where there was a spruce tree. And as Mom grew up, so did that tree.

A year ago, I asked Dad if Mom had ever written a poem about that tree. In deep mourning, he was stalwartly sorting through Mom’s decades of writings. He promised to watch out for anything she’d written about that spruce – he remembered it well.

Although Dad never did run across anything, I recently found a few mentions of the tree in Mom’s college letters to Dad.

Also this, from a longer essay published in Windmills of the Mind, her alma mater‘s annual literary publication.

A Connecticut Yankee Leaves Home … again

Since the spruce in front of the house I grew up in in New Haven stood so high it filled the little window of my upstairs playroom-study, I have loved trees and growing things. Snow wrapped its great branches in the storms of winter, on rainy evening street lights lit it like a jeweler’s window.

When I was a college senior (home for Thanksgiving and studying Shakespeare by practical candlelight because our power was out), I turned for a moment to my tree by the window – and looked into sudden emptiness.

It was gone.

In my pajamas, in the darkness, I flew below to find it lying like a dying soldier on the ground. The storm that had damaged our electric lines had claimed another victim. No prop my sympathetic father used could keep it up for long. The roots would never hold again. Although I did not know it then, my own roots were beginning to stir in the house I had lived in for more that twenty years.

Like the tree, I had been a long time in one place. There were cousins next door and grandparents behind – so much family that at times I couldn’t breathe. I knew I wanted independence and room to grow; only later did I see the horizon of my wish.

~ Joan Vayo, January 1974

That November weekend in 1951, Mom wrote to Dad about her tree:

All too soon after, sadly, she wrote: Well, darling, our tree is gone again. For good this time. Some little wind pushed it over last week. The cable snapped and the pipes turned over. It looks like an old man who just fell flat on his face. My father is getting a new one to take its place when he gets around. But, darn it, there’ll never be another as big. I can see everything out of my little room now. It looks so naked. But I’ll get used to it.

One of Mom and Dad’s wedding photos, from November 1952, was taken on that spot where the spruce tree stood for so long. (I wish I had a better quality picture to share; this one is literally postage-stamp size.)

By the way, I took a look at the New Haven weather archives for conditions on that day in 1951. Surely the Maximum Wind Gust is a technical error, but considering what a strong and beloved tree that spruce was, maybe that’s exactly what it took to knock it down.

“A Connecticut Yankee Leaves Home … again” © 1974 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

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