The photo protocol was the part that suited me. Observers who opted in set up fixed photo points: a marked spot on the ground, a fixed compass bearing, a fixed height, a fixed time of day. You stand in the same place, point the camera in the same direction, and take the same picture of the same tree, twice a week, every week, forever. The idea is that the pictures become a flipbook of the seasons, and the researchers can run them through software that measures the greenness of the canopy pixel by pixel. Repeat photography, the old range scientists call it. They used to do it with glass plates.
I chose seven points. The buckeye on the triangle. The pin oak on the corner. The Pruitts' redbud, with Ruth Pruitt's permission. The black walnut and a stand of spicebush along the greenway. A sugar maple behind the clubhouse — for Dale. And a big shagbark hickory at the end of Bobwhite Court where the woods began. At each one I set a small aluminum survey tag in the ground, the kind with a stake, flush with the turf so the mowers would pass over it, stamped with a number: WH-1 through WH-7. Before I put a single tag on common ground, I wrote to the HOA board and asked permission, and the board — at that time with a treasurer named Hal Brenner who actually answered his email — wrote back the same week and said it sounded wonderful and to go ahead. I printed that email. I'm a biology teacher. I print things.
The camera was an Olympus Tough, a squat, waterproof, shock-proof point-and-shoot that I'd bought for field trips years before. It had a built-in GPS that stamped every frame with coordinates, and a little electronic compass. Every Tuesday and Friday at seven in the morning, unless it was pouring, I walked the loop: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It took about fifty minutes. I'd come home, make coffee, and upload the morning's pictures to the project portal, which logged the upload on the university's server with its own time stamp. Then I'd write my observations in a ledger, a green clothbound book, in pencil. Old habits.
I did this for two and a half years. Nearly two hundred and fifty mornings. Rain jackets, ice cleats, sunscreen, a headlamp in December when seven a.m. was still dark and the pictures came out blue. The neighbors got used to me. The Feeney kids called me the Tree Lady. Gus Delgado, a retired tool-and-die man from Thrasher Court, started meeting me at the pin oak with two cups of coffee in a cardboard carrier, and we'd walk the rest of the loop together while he told me about his late wife, Imelda, and her roses, and about the Big Three in the seventies, and about how nobody made anything anymore.
And the trees told the truth, twice a week, in pictures.
* * *
I met Karen Whitcombe the week I moved in.
She came to my door with a gift basket — a candle, a sleeve of shortbread, a laminated map of the neighborhood — and a white three-ring binder two inches thick. The binder was the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions of the Wren Hollow Homeowners Association, along with the bylaws, the Architectural Guidelines, and an eleven-page appendix of rules and regulations that she told me, with evident pride, she had written herself.
"We're a self-managed community now," she said, standing in my front hall and looking past me into the living room at the boxes. "We let the management company go two years ago. They were charging us an arm and a leg and doing nothing. So I handle most things personally." She smiled. She had very white teeth. "You'll find I'm very hands-on."
She noticed the camera on the hall table, where I'd set it down with my keys.
"Are you a photographer?"