This is a VERY long post, but I hope that some of you will read it and like it. It's an essay I wrote a couple of years ago when one of the trees in the yard at my parent's house had to be cut down.

I have always loved trees. They are not just plants to me; they are benevolent spirits, lives that share the planet with us. Call it my Irish druidic roots. I watched a TV documentary once about the loss of the rainforests, and they showed a very graphic film of a huge rainforest tree being cut down for lumber. I shuddered and sobbed. It was traumatic.

So, when we lost the tree that lived outside my bedroom window, I wrote this.

Some of you may have noticed that my recent posts have been "pre-fab." I'm exhausted. My job is draining all the energy out of me. I keep meaning to post about my job. Part of me is terrified that my boss will surf in and read it. I think I really just don't want to feel all the emotions that will come up as I write that story. And it is a story indeed.

So, as I'm pondering the changes a person goes through in their life, some necessary, others which could have been avoided, I'm reminded of the loss of my tree. I couldn't believe that this poor tree really had to go. I couldn't accept it. How do we protect the things we love from things we can't even see?
____________________________________________________________________________________________

The Life and Death of Trees

I grew up in a small, two-bedroom, one bathroom house with a finished upstairs. When I was 13 I convinced my parents to let me move up there, and I spent my adolescent years looking out the window at the life and times of the inhabitants of the mid-to-upper branches of a medium sized Silver Maple tree. This November, during a mighty thunderstorm, a 6-inch limb broke off the tree and crashed to the ground, inches from our next-door neighbor’s driveway. No property was damaged. The limb was examined. It was diseased through and through. The tree doctors came to evaluate my tree, and sure enough, it had to come down. That Sunday, the 30th, they chopped it down.

The lives intertwined with this tree were incredible. There were two nesting pairs of birds there: a pair of doves and a pair of robins. The Robins only lived there one summer, when I was about 14, but I remember admiring the pretty, fawn-colored Mother Robin sitting still in her nest for hours daily, and then one day she was gone, and I saw the tiny pale blue eggs. I watched that nest religiously, every morning and every afternoon. Finally, the chicks hatched, and a few magical times, I watched her feed them. They were so tiny I could barely see them, and Mommy bird had built the nest up protectively around them, but I could catch a glimpse from time to time. They were so tiny and helpless, they couldn’t even stand, and would fall over themselves reaching for the food. Their heads were all closed eyes and screeching beaks. I watched them grow bigger and fuzzier, and venture out of the nest. I went outside a number of times that summer to bring my cats into the house, imprisoning them until the younglings learned to fly in the yard.

The doves, however, were a different story. I never saw the Daddy Robin, but the nesting couple of doves came to court every spring for about 10 years, perched on my air conditioner, cooing. There they were, inches from me! Not even in the tree itself, but on the air conditioner, sitting a few inches from each other, cooing and cleaning each others’ feathers, and hopping from side to side, spooning. They were small, delicate, pale grey things with black pearls for eyes. The female was practically white, with greyish underfeathers that showed when she languorously stretched her wings. The male was slightly darker in color with thick, muscular legs, and he hopped all around her, showing off. They were avian versions of us, entrancing to me, and therapeutic to watch, as my own turbulent dating relationships came and went. They were like newlyweds, and they chose my tree as their first home together. Their large nest was too high for me to see into, but I voyeuristically watched them court, flirt, and squabble, envying their growing, dedicated relationship, their settled home in the beautiful tree, and their obvious love for one another. These birds had obviously figured out the relationship thing far better than I had.

At the base of the tree, parallel to the house, grew a peony bush, with it’s huge, pom-ponish blooms, crawling with ants and therefore unsuitable for bouquets, but perfuming the entire side yard. Also growing in the shade of the tree, facing the house wall, were tall purple irises, obviously planted by the house’s former owners, but delightfully bold and colorful, decadently thrusting their petals into view, demanding attention, and of course always getting it. Some more genteel daffodils grew in the shade of the tree, wrapping around the trunk, waving their cheery yellow trumpets just under the iris’s gaudy blooms, which the daffodils never seemed to resent. Daffodils are such community flowers; they grew all around our house, sharing soil with trees, lilacs, shrubs, dandelions, violets, anything, and always just happy to be alive. Squirrels dashed up and down the tree daily, some leaping acrobatically to the TV antenna on the side of the house, a silver triangular ladder covered in milkweed vines. The squirrels would dash blindingly fast up the tree, leap to the TV tower, climb down it, run around the house, and back up the tree again. It must have been one of the best obstacle courses in the neighborhood. Somehow the doves never seemed to be disturbed.

This tree was just as much home to my friends as my house was to me. They were my neighbors, and we respected each other’s space, even if I did peep from my window. However, if my house got termites, we could call the exterminator. When the tree got sick, we had no idea at all.

It had a virus. There is some insidious virus that is particularly voracious to “soft-wood” trees, like Silver Maples, and the Tulip Tree that used to inhabit our front yard. It attacks the roots and goes directly to the center of the tree, eating away the inner root and nutrient transport system, invisible from the outside. Unlike Cancer, it affords virtually no early detection opportunities.
Some years ago, the Tulip Tree in our front yard had to be removed, stump rooted out and all, because of this horrible disease. My mother and I were devastated. “Removed?! You mean killed! We can’t just destroy it! It’s a living thing, older than all of us! We’ve got to heal it, not just euthanize it!” We could not believe we would lose our 50-foot friend with its wide, waxy leaves as large as your hand and delicate yellow blooms. We refused to acknowledge it for months, even when whole limbs began to lose leaves, until half of the tree was yellow and desiccated, and several tree experts had diagnosed the same sickness, shaking their heads sadly at my mother’s wrath. One day, Mom and I finally stood together in the yard, looking at the pathetic thing which had once been so proud, and held each other while Daddy called the tree removers. It was gone by the following week, stump and all, the soil treated with anti-viral and anti-fungal chemicals. All that remained was a 3-foot bare spot in the lawn. We cried.

Of course we planted a new tree in its place. Mom and Dad waited a sufficient amount of time, a respectful mourning period, and then they went tree shopping. Mom had always wanted a dogwood, so that’s what they got. It turns out Dogwoods are not susceptible to the type of rot that had felled our Tulip tree. I was away at college, but Mom called me the day they brought home a tiny, 5 ½ foot tree and planted it carefully in the spot where the Tulip had been. She was thrilled. I sent her a pink greeting card that said “Congratulations on the New Arrival,” and when I arrived home for that weekend’s visit, I saw it, bright and new and sweet, a vivacious baby girl tree, limbs already starting to show the characteristic gnarly quality of Dogwoods, and little buds at the ends of the branches. She won’t get her first blooms for a number of years yet, but that’s ok. These early years are magical in their own way.

My Maple is a different story though. There was no extended diagnoses, no multiple opinions sought, no long-drawn out suffering, watching it waste away. We know this disease now. When the tree couldn’t save its own limb from being torn off in the high winds of that thunderstorm, its condition was clear to all. We knew what must be done, and my parents wasted no time. One day we took it for granted; the next, we knew we had to say goodbye. My mother, despite her grief, knew it had to be, given not only the tree’s disease progression as evidenced by examination of the severed limb, but also the proximity to the neighbor’s house and ours. If another limb fell, it could destroy a car, cave in a roof, part of a wall, or even seriously injure or kill a person. I know that tree. It had nurtured life all the years I’d known it. We could never allow such things to happen. We acted quickly.

My father took photographs while the tree was being removed. The tree specialists removed the minor limbs first, with a chain saw. The major limbs came next, cracking away from the trunk and hitting the earth with mighty thuds. Finally they felled the great trunk. The men chopped away at one side of the tree, exposing the diseased insides, then moved around to the other side and resumed chopping, so they could control the fall. Daddy photographed everything. They chipped the wood to be used as mulch, returning it to the earth, completing the circle of life, so to speak. They left some chips of clean, uninfected wood in a small pile in the spot where the tree stood. I can’t decide if this is poignant or macabre. I do not know if they dug up the flowers before they began work on the tree or not. I am sure, however, that they too are now gone. I pray fervently that they forgive us, and forgive my tree, who could no longer care for them, or protect them from the workmen’s spade.

I will be flying home for Christmas in a few weeks. I know there will be a wide, sunny space between our house and the neighbors’ house, where my tree used to live. My Silver Maple was easily 50 or 60 years old, likely much more. I remember it was just big enough that I couldn’t get my arms around it. I also know the peony bush will be gone, as well as the arrogant irises and perky daffodils. Thankfully, I know my doves haven’t nested there for a number of years, so wherever they are living, they are safe, and didn’t have to witness the destruction of their newlywed home. I doubt very much if squirrels care for one tree any more than another, and anyway they still have 3 others around my house to play in, and the TV tower is still there.

I will feel the emptiness like a cold spot in my chest. I will stand in bright, unobstructed sunbeams in the very spot where my tree lived for all those years, and cry. My Mother will probably join me there. Our neighbor will probably come out on the porch and ask us what in Heaven’s name is the matter, did something happen, drying her hands on a kitchen towel. We’ll all laugh at our seemingly inappropriate emotional attachment to a plant, and let the neighbor in on the joke, and maybe all have a cup of tea together and talk about what kind of cookies we’ll all bake for Christmas this year. But Mom and I understand. It wasn’t just a plant. It was a very large, old, respected, loving, generous, hospitable, vibrant life form, cut down in life by a sickness that nobody could heal. We will miss it. We already ache for it and the memories from my childhood. We will talk about it long after we plant another tree in its spot. We loved it, and we will remember it.