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Missing an old friend

3 min read

The view from the porch swing is strange now. Last week, when I was reading there, I would look up to see the sturdy trunk of a pin oak dominating the front yard. Now I see grass and air and other houses.

My tree is no more. I call it mine because, in the past several years as we’ve watched the tree grow old and frail, I’ve taken its demise personally.

Who knew that trees died of old age? I’d always thought of trees as being forever, impervious to anything but an axe. But like the rest of us, they have a span of life. In recent years, we’d notice dead branches on the one side, and the tree began to look like it had suffered a stroke. We would prune it every year and even, several years ago, administered vitamins through spikes inserted in a ring around the trunk.

I think that gave the tree an extra few years, but by this spring it became inevitable: The root structure was iffy and the tree became a liability. At 85 feet high, the wrong storm could send it crashing into a house, or a person.

And so one morning, the men in hard hats brought their saws and their trucks to the yard. First they removed two stones from beneath it. The stones have the words, “Clementine, Our Pretty Girl” and “Sweet Mabel June” – the memorials of our beloved dogs whose ashes were scattered beneath the tree in short, quiet ceremonies in 2003 and 2007. Both dogs liked to sit under it and think about chasing the squirrels who lived there. The branches were never low enough for my kids to climb it, but they loved the leaves; every autumn they jumped in mounds of them.

If I weren’t so sad I would have found the tree removal fascinating to watch. You don’t chop down a tree in a neighborhood – you dismantle it starting at the top. A man in a cherry picker lifted himself to the very highest branch and started sawing. The dead branches landed with a sickening crash; a few fell vertically, planting themselves like new trees in the ground. The leafy branches fell more slowly as they caught some air.

Branches were fed into a chipper, a brutal machine that filled the neighborhood with a grinding noise and the smell of dying wood. By noon, all but a few huge blocks of trunk were gone. What had taken God and nature a hundred years to build, a crew of five men had erased in four hours.

I’d always placed the tree’s age at 100, because that’s about how old our house is. A worker counted the rings (a precise task requiring reading glasses and a metal pick) and came up with 90. He said a tree grows outward, with the newest rings sitting closest to the bark. He pointed out dark places on the rings, marking drier years or years when the tree was struggling.

As he counted I could see the life when this was our home, the 21 years that tree was ours. Most rings were happy and easy, some were sad and hard – as is the case with most trees and families.

For all of those rings and all those years, that silent giant was standing there, as much a part of us as the house and porch swing and the dogs and the children. Home feels different now, a little vulnerable and empty. That tree was always there, casting its long shadow on us, and now it’s gone.

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