'To Be the Symbol of a Great Largesse'

Sometimes I suspect I’m a country man marooned in the city, though I grew up in the suburbs. Years ago I read an anthropologist who theorized that our species’ ideal setting, given our birth on the plains of Africa, is a pasture, meadow or prairie bordered by forest. We can hunt – and find shelter among the trees. That’s how I picture the perfect surroundings. Always with trees and optional water, which is why deserts seem so disturbing. The absence of green. A crew of Guatemalans trimmed our trees last week, juggling chain saws while suspended by ropes. They evened up three oaks and one pine in the front and a lone oak in the back. Our Houston neighborhood is called Oak Forest. In the essay “The City Shepherd’s Calendar” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s, 1975), L.E. Sissman writes as a lifelong city dweller who has moved with his wife to the country and adapted Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). For the month of May in the North he writes: “All flower names:…