In which we welcome Loie Roberts, and give him our all.
2024-09-06
Dear reader,
How does a tree grow? It slips.
When does a trip become “slippery”? For the American elm and many regional leaf-bearing trees, they do it once a year, in the spring. The bark of any tree is said to be slipping when cells in the cambium proliferate. Cambial cells are the growing layer of a tree, just inside the inner bark. They start out undifferentiated, then become new bark and the new annular ring of wood.
The fleeting presence of this slippery layer of cells means that in spring, you can cut through the elm’s outer bark and then peel it as easily as an orange. Like with an orange, you could do this to obtain food and water. The slipperier the better. Slippery Elm is a species with especially slick inner bark that Abenaki of the region chew to slake thirst. Why let them have all the fun? Anyone with access to a tea aisle can sip soothing elm cambium in the form of “Throat Coat” tea.
My firstborn boy came out 13 years ago this October with me cheering mom at her back. Hospital nurses caught Felix and wiped him clean before I held him. Thus it was left to my second-born to teach me that slippery bark has, in my estimation, a human analogue.
Loie Q.E. Roberts spent 38 weeks and six days in a womb of amniotic fluid before pressing his way out into air-breathing humanity on July 26, 2024 at 3:21 a.m. Why do storks get all the credit? Alison worked hard for this—on her hands and knees. Her water had broken that day in two parts (another learning for us both), leading me to rush our plans to turn our woodshop into a birthing room. I had barely carried out the tablesaw and boiled water for the blow-up hot tub when, at the climax of six hours of active labor, she delivered him with six pushes.
“I see a head,” our midwife shouted out after number five. I reached down to touch it, and moments later found all of Loie’s seven pounds, seven ounces in my hands. I let him linger as a fish for one last moment, and then caught him up into the air. As I held him in front of my adoring eyes, he sneezed the water out and took his first breaths.
Did I say “adoring eyes”? Gimme a break. I was also terrified. Loie might be pronounced like “low E,” the most unbreakable guitar string, but I feared letting him slip through my fingers, and that might not have been the best start to our relationship.
Our newborn photos all show Loie with clean, glowing skin. Don’t be fooled. Along with a touch of blood, he came out looking like a kid at the beach whose mom put a whole bottle of sunscreen on him, and did not rub it in. This generous coating of vernix caseosa, a white waxy substance, helped him slide through the cervix.
My sleeves soaked up gobs of vernix. The rest seemed to evaporate within minutes, but not before keeping me on my toes. We chose to not cut Loie’s cord until his tiny heart had drained it of blood. The umbilical tie to mom being about as short as that in a pay phone, this called for me to hold him close to his mother’s behind as she stepped from tub to bed and then birthed the placenta 10 minutes later. Through this dance, vernix made Loie slippery as an elm in spring in my hands.
Let me shout it again from the rooftops—Loie, the fetus Alison named “Birdie,” is here! Sometimes I check to be sure. Sleeping on me, I love feel the heaving of his chest. Putting him down, I’ll bring my ear to his nose to listen.
Both are seldom needed. When awake and even when asleep, Loie pedals his legs and stretches his arms. And whether he’s doing that, or burping, pooping, or hiccuping, he verbalizes. Perhaps he’s praying to the Muslim god, for his cries sound to me like “Ah-LA. Ah-LA. Ah-LA.” Or perhaps he’s a dolphin, the way he chirps as he catches his breath.
Who is Loie Roberts? I felt his scrotum sitting on my wrist before I saw it. Even after pausing for visual confirmation, it took me only seconds to gender Loie—“It’s a boy!” We paused for six days before naming him. Now it’s his turn. Loie means “understanding,” and ours grows through listening.
Vernix being key to “new baby smell,” please don’t judge the following. Four weeks in, changing his diaper, I noticed a fold of skin inside his right armpit. When I found within it his very last pouch of vernix residue, my first move wasn’t to reach for a wipe or to run a bath. My first move was to sniff it.
I don’t regret that it was as sour as his burp cloth. I only feel a pang for how fast moments like these go by. Loie’s slipping, from feeding to nap to feeding again. As for me, though I’m exhausted, I’m celebrating being an old elm serving a new one.
Elm trees “slip” at other life-cycle stages, too. Elm cambium is the pinnacle of cuisine to the elm bark beetle, which tunnels long feeding “galleries” through it. That wasn’t a big deal until 1928, when a microfungus arrived here from Asia via the Netherlands and began spreading itself via the beetle. The American elm couldn’t adapt to “Dutch elm disease.” Playing defense, elms cut off their own upward flow of water. The skyward limbs die first. Elms that once graced countless American streets with vase-shaped silouhettes all-but disappeared.
Elms persist here in the countryside, but with short lifespans. And when the tree succumbs, the beetle’s burrows cause the bark to peel off in huge plates. As a child I found immense satisfaction building forts with chunks of elm bark. Tucked into our woodlot next to a burbling brook, I’d lean branches like rafters against a dead trunk and lay down bark as a shingle roof.
The best part about elm forts wasn’t climbing in and feeling more at home than anywhere else. It wasn’t imagining myself warmed by a fire there on a winter night, all the forest blanketed in snow. The best part was using all I had to make something out of nothing, and the feeling that that was enough.