There is a novel written by American author Thomas Wolfe titled “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  I confess I’ve never read it, but the phrase of the title has entered our language. It means that once you have left a small town and moved to the big city, your mind set changes to the point that you can never recover the way of life you had and any attempt to revisit old memories of those times will fail.

               Wolfe was wrong. Wolfe wrote his book before the internet and Google Maps.

               There is a really interesting game you can play by looking up all the places you have lived to see what changes have happened since you were last there. Google Street View is especially effective in doing this.

               What I found is that not only can you go home again, you can find out some surprising and wonderful things about what has happened in the meantime.

               I recently did this exercise with some of my childhood homes. The house where I lived as an infant, a United Church manse in rural Quebec, is now overtaken by development, including a huge apartment in the back yard. The manse is now a day care.

               Another manse is now surrounded by huge cedar hedges, which I certainly don’t remember.

               Another home, on the west island of Montreal, is now part of a very attractive community with parks and mature trees. When I lived there, we planted those trees. The sky was wide open and you could see the aircraft landing at Dorval airport. Now the streets are shadowed with a canopy of maples and the hedge we planted gives a full privacy fence (but it needs trimming).

               The best picture of a former home I found was in another subdivision in the Erindale area of Mississauga.

               Now that is a community which has changed.

               When I lived there, several decades ago, it was a new subdivision. There were no trees. Even the utilities were underground. Houses were the tallest thing, not hydro poles. Again, we planted trees.

               It was most rewarding was to see a stone retaining wall my father and I built together, still in place, still holding the change in elevation of the front lawn and the garden we planted. What was most remarkable, however, were the trees which the city had planted on the boulevard; that strip between the sidewalk and the street.

               The trees had matured. What were originally seven foot Mountain Ash trees are now forty and fifty feet tall, giving shade in the summer, reducing heat load on the houses. It is a delight to see.

               That’s why I was pleased to see recently that the estate of the late Eva Leflar has set aside money for tree planting in all municipalities and First Nations communities across Grey and Bruce. Administered through the Community Foundation, this could result in 25 large sugar maples or a hundred medium sized trees being planted in each community. And wouldn’t that be a positive change for everyone? 

               Do we need trees? Absolutely. Trees matter. Trees are a huge part of our environment and our life on this planet. They clean carbon dioxide from the air, help protect us from the sun and have so many more purposes at various stages of their life.

             In the United Church of Canada’s faith document “A New Creed”, we say “We are called to be the Church: to celebrate God's presence, to live with respect in Creation, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.”

               I don’t know of many churches who include as a part of their foundational theology “... to live with respect in Creation,”. It’s an acknowledgement that we are partners with God and with each other in respecting, protecting and preserving this world, so wonderfully entrusted to us by our Creator.

               Trees, their planting and nurture, are a huge part of living with respect in Creation. Not just for us, but for our children and our children’s children.

Rev. David Shearman is the minister of Central Westside United Church, Owen Sound and the host of Faithworks on Rogers TV - Grey County, Cable 53.