These days, when I visit The Archer’s Home on D’Urban Street, I get no lively greetings from the elderly seated in the living room – just glum faces, staring beyond the barred windows at a world from which they feel increasingly disengaged. Their beautiful vista has been ‘stumped’. Now, the sea breeze journeys past without a whisper or a sigh, because there is no stately silk cotton tree to give it pause. Their tree, over 100 years in the making, has been brutally dismembered, and one of its massive falling limbs flattened the gazebo beneath which I would sit from time to time with the old lady I visit.
Nestled in the crook of the silk cotton tree’s gigantic buttresses, the gazebo was the old people’s getaway. From the comfort of the gazebo, they could look out onto D’urban Street and connect vicariously to the hustle and bustle of GT. Every time I pass that tree, I feel anger welling up inside because the thoughtless and the careless are ruining the lives of eco-conscious GT residents.
When did we lose our love for the land? Everywhere I look, I see billboards heralding the resuscitation of Georgetown’s regional distinction as Garden City of the Caribbean, yet day after day, beautiful, life-giving trees are being chopped up or razed to the ground.
Not so long ago, having a garden, a lawn, and a backyard full of fruit trees, was overwhelmingly the homeowner’s dream. Today, falling leaves no longer inspire poems and songs. In the jaded eyes of many renters and homeowners, they’re nothing more than a mess. Fruits hanging on trees, once a blessing from our creator, are now considered a curse because they attract birds and bats. Blue saki, kiskadees, parrots, and hummingbirds are no longer beautiful sights to behold in flight, they’re nuisances and litterbugs; butterflies emerging from cocoons and flitting effortlessly from bloom to bloom, are no longer perfect examples of the miracle of life; they are no longer a way for the young to learn about metamorphosis, but an irritant to be brushed aside like a gnat. The warm soil upon which worms, bacteria, microbes work feverishly to help provide mankind with nutritional sustenance, has become something dirty, untidy, to be covered over with, hidden away under, layers of hard and sterile concrete. When did we lose our understanding of who we truly are?