Farewell to a tree

 

Not my tree but close
I couldn't find an image of my tree. 

Almost thirty years ago I bought our house because I loved the spacious front porch and had visions of entertaining on it. And entertain I did—from dinner for one or two to pot-luck Mexican parties for Jordan and a whole crowd of her friends. In fact, the front porch is where I watched the romance between Jordan and Christian blossom. But always, what anchored the house and the porch to the neighborhood, indeed to the earth, was the huge old elm at the curb next to the driveway.

We treasured that tree, watched birds nest in it and squirrels chase each other. Once when someone told me vines would kill it, I tore down all the vines that were creeping up the trunk—not an easy job and hard on my hands. Periodically, it lost branches—large branches. Once a neighbor charged me sixty dollars to rush down and trim a branch which he declared was a hazard to children coming and going to the school across the street. Another time, I came home from my oldest son’s wedding in the Caymans to find tree branches covering the whole front yard.

It took me years to figure out that because it was in the boulevard it was the city’s responsibility not mine. When I finally realized that I could save a whole lot of money by calling the city when the tree had a problem, I had a new worry: would they cut it down? I had friends who went on vacation and came home to find a huge tree that had been in front of their house gone. Such is the stuff of nightmares when you live in an older neighborhood with huge trees that arch across the street to form a canopy. It’s one of the things I love about my neighborhood. Finally, one city arborist said to me, “Lady, we are in the business of saving trees, not tearing them down.” Still I knew that the tree was old and would become a danger. Today, I suspect that it’s almost a hundred years old—that’s how old the house will be next year, and I imagine the tree was planted when the house was built.

So today a forestry crew from the city parks and recreation department came to clear away the fallen branch. And they delivered bad news: the tree is rotten and a danger. They will come back this week to take it totally down. So we are left with dilemmas. Will they plant a new tree? Even so, it won’t grow appreciably in my lifetime. Will they take away the stump? Christian thinks probably not. What about the roots that extend gosh knows how far? Today I assured a neighbor who lives a block away that the roots probably reach to her house—they certainly reach nearly to our house on the far side of our yard.

I am heartbroken, but I know I would be more so if the tree fell and hurt someone. We were lucky yesterday that the branch fell at two o’clock and not three, when children were on their way home from school. And there’s that old possibility that I always worried about—the tree could fall on the house. It’s spring, the season of violent storms in North Texas, and it could happen any day.

I wish now they would come take it away first thing in the morning. It has begun to seem to me like anticipating surgery—you just really want to get it over with. I have not gone out to the curb—not easy for me to do—but a part of me thinks I should go thank the tree for shading us, for giving us a sense of place and stability all these years. I don’t want it to go without a grateful farewell.

And there’s that nakedness that the house will feel. The kids sit out on the porch a lot, especially late at night, with a glass of wine when they can talk about the day. I am selfishly glad that I am back in my cottage, where I sit on the patio and don’t go to the front of the house that often. I can put it out of my mind. But then again, that doesn’t seem quite fair to the tree.

Maybe I need to call up the spirit of Joyce Kilmer.