Having been educated in grades 1-8 at JP’s Our Lady of Lourdes School (now Meridian Academy, whose tuition is $38,900, as contrasted with $10 for OLOL in the 50s), I was used to doing most of our written in-school work on the back of Sears Roebuck order forms. It seemed that somebody in the parish would lay claim to the order forms that were being discontinued and would bring them into our school, where the nuns could access them. It not only saved the school and its students money for not obliging them to go to the nearest Kresge’s or Woolworth’s to purchase notebooks and their paper, but in today’s thoughts of saving trees and minimizing landfills the procedure was grounded in ecology.

I bring this up because I have amassed more than a ream of scrap paper that for many years I utilize for sundry purposes. Much of it I receive from the utility and credit card companies – who frequently use only one side for their messaging; other are from single-sided at-home printed material that is no longer useful.

It was first taught that the usage of computers would lead to a paperless society. I fell hook, line, and sinker for this mantra. But my pile of scrap paper stays virtually the same: in spite of my usage of it for grocery lists and things-to-do, the amount is being continually replenished with the opening of the daily mail.

Yeah, saving trees is important to me: Why use more paper towels than necessary? Why waste toilet paper for decorating trees? Why waste one-sided-clean paper when it is available for writing down grocery lists and other such items?

Even if you don’t believe in relishing scrap paper, at least think of Joyce Kilmer’s simple poem “Trees” as you enjoy the glorious New England foliage. Written in February 1913, it is an assemblage of twelve lines of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse, describing what Kilmer perceives as the human inability of art to replicate the beauty achieved by nature.

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree …

A tree whose hung mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

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And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree._