Dear Editor,
These days, when I visit the Archer’s Home on D’Urban Street, I get no lively greetings from the elderly – just glum faces, staring beyond barred windows at a world from which they feel increasingly disengaged. Sea breezes journey past without a whisper or a sigh, because there is no stately silk cotton tree to give it pause. Their tree (see photo), over 100 years in the making, has been brutally dismembered, and one of its massive falling limbs flattened the gazebo (see photo) beneath which I would sit from time to time with the old lady I visit. Nestled in the crook of the tree’s gigantic buttresses, the gazebo was the old people’s getaway. From there, they could connect vicariously to the hustle and bustle of D’Urban Street. Every time I pass that tree, stripped of all its dignity, I feel anger welling up inside at yet another example of the thoughtless and careless destruction of our city’s natural treasures.
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, once a blessing from our creator, are now considered a curse because they attract birds and bats. Kiskadees and hummingbirds are no longer beautiful sights to behold in flight, just nuisances and litterbugs; and butterflies emerging from cocoons to flit effortlessly from bloom to bloom, are no longer perfect examples of the miracle of life, a way for the young to learn about metamorphosis, but irritants to be swatted away. The warm soil upon which mites, worms, and bacteria work feverishly to help provide mankind with nutritional sustenance, has become something filthy, unpleasant, to be hidden away under layers of sterile concrete. When did we lose our love for the land?
Yours faithfully,
Maureen Marks-Mendonca
Author & Retired Econometrician