Trees planted for a marriage shade future generations the planters never meet

Evidence

There was a custom in the mid-eighteen hundreds of planting twin trees to celebrate a marriage and the starting of a home. The stance of these two, just ten feet apart, recalls a couple standing together on the porch steps, holding hands. The reach of their shade links the front porch with the barn across the road, creating a shady path of back and forth for that young family. … I realize that those first homesteaders were not the beneficiaries of that shade, at least not as a young couple. They must have meant for their people to stay here. Surely those two were sleeping up on Cemetery Road long before the shade arched across the road. I am living today in the shady future they imagined, drinking sap from trees planted with their wedding vows. They could not have imagined me, many generations later, and yet I live in the gift of their care. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 236

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the trees-as-infrastructure essay: the twin wedding maples are planted shade and future trust — a concrete case of trees as cross-generational infrastructure and the grafting-as-legacy metaphor realized literally.
• XREF: Living in the ‘shady future’ of planters parallels the ch5 claim that landscape beings raise a person into place — here the temporality of land care is made explicit across generations. — connects to: Patriarchal marriage serves collective interests, not individual love or happiness — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1132

Broader Connections

• Patriarchal marriage serves collective interests, not individual love or happiness #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1132