I wrote about Toomer’s Corner earlier this year when Auburn won the National Championship. While I know few outside of the South care at all, Toomer’s is making national news this week, so I’ve got a bit more to say.
This picture was taken shortly after Auburn rallied from 24 points down to win the Iron Bowl against Auburn’s biggest rival. We all know it’s just a game, but I think that picture, as grainy and low-resolution as it is, does a pretty excellent job of encapsulating the kind of emotions us Auburn fans experience at Toomer’s Corner after a win. Everyone is represented at Toomer’s from parents with infants to older couples reveling in nostalgia.
The crux of the whole thing is the rolling of two 130 year old oak trees standing proudly on the corner of campus. It sounds a bit juvenile, but it’s our traditions, and no one said traditions have to make a whole lot of sense. The significance of those nights is not the win or the action, but the experience of it all: the community, hugging and kissing strangers, handing a roll of toilet paper to a small child enjoying one of their first Auburn wins. It’s something that is uniquely ours.
However, a fan of Auburn’s biggest rivals poured large concentrations of herbicides around those trees a mere week after that picture up there was taken. Now? Those oaks trees, which have stood on that corner for nearly as long as the university has existed, will likely die. And that sucks.
This morning the university held a press conference about it, and I kind of laughed at how silly we were being about two trees. Yeah, they’re beautiful and a part of tradition, but they’re just trees. Why is this grown man on TV tearing up over it?
But then, oh then, I read the last few paragraphs of this little piece by someone with no real connection to Auburn, and I found myself tearing up thinking about nights just like the one in this picture. Those nights were coming to an end for me anyway since I won’t be here next year, but those trees won’t be here when I come back to visit. It’s funny how life tends to be poetic like that. I’m sure glad those trees were here while I was because they’ve given me some great memories with wonderful people.
