The tree limb landed with a dull thump, barely audible under the buzz of a chainsaw.
Another thump. More whirring and grinding. Thump, thump, thump.
The ash tree that has provided our front yard with shade for the 11 years we have lived in Wildwood was coming down, the victim of disease. Like the ash trees that , the ones on our leafy suburban street had been marked for death because of the emerald ash borer, which has marched from east to west, first hopping the great Mississippi River into Missouri in 2008.
In my life, trees have marked the passage of time. The first one of any particular meaning was the Eastern cottonwood in my front yard in Littleton, Colorado. Its sturdy lower branch let me climb into the expanse of its wide girth — up high enough to see over the house and throughout the neighborhood. It was there that I saw our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gump, hiding the bicycle I would later receive for Christmas. My parents thought I was surprised. It was there that I plotted my first escape when I ran away, angry over some slight or another.
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The tree hid me as I spied and imagined and schemed. It comforted me with its presence every time I walked home from school. It devastated me years later, in adulthood, when I drove by and saw it had been chopped to the ground, leaving only a stump.
In his novel †author Richard Powers explains our magical connection to trees, as well as their connection to all other living things.
“It’s sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it’s a million,†writes Powers.
My colleague Derrick Goold bought me “The Overstory†at the Dallas airport on the day in 2019 that Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I met Powers at the Pulitzer ceremony later that summer and I told him about my cottonwood.
More than two decades ago, long after the cottonwood had been cut down, another small tree was planted as a replacement, next to the stump. It was in that yard, on a snowy Christmas Eve, where I stood on the stump and asked Marla to marry me. She said yes.
We eventually ended up in Wildwood, in a home with a shade-providing ash tree in the front yard.
In the back is an even larger oak tree. A few months after we moved in, a young man knocked on the door with what he said was a strange request. He grew up in our house and his father had planted the oak in the back yard, maybe 30 years earlier. He remembered caring for the young sapling with his dad, who had passed. The man had driven by the house and seen the branches reaching high above the roof. He wanted to see his tree — his father’s tree.
We walked to the back yard, and I gave him space. He stared at the tree. He stood there motionless. And then he walked up and hugged the tree, reaching his arms around it as far as they would go, maybe halfway around its base.
The passage of time was marked.
On the day the ash tree came down, it was adorned with toilet paper, the remnants of a Homecoming prank. My two youngest children are in high school, and more than any other Homecoming, this one seemed special. My son is a senior, and it will be his last; my daughter is a sophomore, and it’s her first year in the color guard, taking part in the pageantry of the Friday night Homecoming football game.
They are growing up, branching out. And before we know it, like the ash tree that protected us from the sun’s rays, they will be gone. Of my six children, they are the only two who have had their “first-day-of-school†photos taken in the same place from kindergarten to high school — together on the sidewalk, under the shade of the ash tree that no longer stands as a sentry guarding our home.
Its roots are still buried in the yard, touching perhaps a million other things, connecting one story that has ended to another that has just begun.