She Was Seventy Feet Tall

“I…can’t…talk…about…this…right…now.” My words were choppy as I tried to catch my breath with my voice wobbling into sobs.

In my marriage, we divide and conquer. We share a great deal of the responsibilities of owning a home that’s over a hundred year old. In fairness, my husband takes on more of the burden in the fourth quarter, my busiest. I, however, rule the other nine months.

Coordination of the trimming of our three large, old trees fell to him. He called the arborists, set the appointments, kept the appointments, and booked the work.

 

My workdays are mostly fun-filled, ten-hour affairs at my dream business, and I usually arrive home by 7:00 pm in a rosy mood. I also—on many a Saturday evening—am on a dead tear after a day at work to get back out of the house in a change of clothes for the theater, a party, or a charity gala.

On this Saturday night, I had a friend picking me up for a charity event thirty minutes after I got home. My husband and I have been known to “debrief” each other on the day’s activities at the end of a day, and, on this day, he had information about the tree in our back yard to share as he followed me up the stairs.

As I wound my way up to drop my bags in my office before jumping in the shower, he worked his way around to the conversation he had had with the tree guy in which he was told that one of the three trees—the only one in the back of the house—was ill and needed to come down.

Cue Breakdown #1. I can’t talk about this right now. I really did not let him finish what he had been told about life span and fungus and such, things I learned later. I stopped him in his tracks with tears the size of swimming pools. I can’t talk about this right now. I meant it; he said little, and I moved on through a delightful evening thinking about anything but trees.

I waited a full twenty-four hours and then proceeded with Breakdown #2. It started when our son wandered into my mind.

He had been home this past summer for only one month, after having been away for his first year of college. One of those days was a lazy one, and he slept in a chaise on the back deck while I caught up on some writing and magazines a few feet away. He was fully shaded by the seventy-foot hackberry tree that had been there all of his life. He was a picture in blue that day, and I really don’t need the photo I captured to remember it forever.

I looked up that day into the far distant branches of the tree above him and noticed I could see more of the sky than ever. The leaves seemed smaller, and the branches less full. It was alarming enough to stick with me so that, within a few hours, I had mentioned it to my husband in passing. It was weird, for sure, and then life moved on at a wicked pace; our son returned to New Jersey, and I seldom looked up as I climbed the deck stairs.

Breakdown #2 started with that memory of my son flitting through my mind as I looked out a window. This window is across from where I have slept every night since the mid-90s, and the view has always includes branches of the tree that I was grudgingly able to admit was coming down. The tears were slower this time as the old glass and tree became blurrier. They were then lost as I buried my face in a pillow.

This is the window I looked out of a lot when I was heavily pregnant and could only sleep on my left side. I stared out at night into the winter white sky and saw shapes in the empty branches as they danced up and down. I saw eagles and a nude female on her side with her back to me. One night, I saw the shape of a pear when ice formed on the branches. They made oddly different shapes from the extra weight of the ice, and the shapes melted away with the ice in the daylight, never to be seen again with the return ot the beautiful, shapely woman with a sinuous rise from her waist to hip.

As a little boy, our son was always miffed that from the ground floor — our basement level at the back of the house — the tree’s branches were untouchable. They could not be reached by tiny hands to hang birdhouses or those pinecone treasures from preschool that come home coated in peanut butter and birdseed, smashed ever so slightly in a Ziploc bag and smashed a bit more by the backpack.

The mechanism for hanging one of these works of art — which must be dealt with immediately by a doting parent — is the largest diameter yarn that can be found only in preschools and church basements. The entire project is a gooey clump of lusciousness that a good mother is told about the minute her child hits the car and the door closes…and told about again and again until the thing is dangling on a branch for every bird in the neighborhood to enjoy.

He wanted it in this tree, above where we walked every day to the back door from the car. The branches on this lofty beauty didn’t start arching out over the lawn until you got to the second floor, another full floor above the deck and kitchen. No pine cone covered in magic was ever going to hang in that tree, and this bothered his toddler soul. He grudgingly allowed me have him consider the little dogwood tree under the huge oak in the front yard, where we oohed and ahhed over it until it was forgotten about and the yarn showed up woven into a robin’s nest the following spring, the pine cone long gone.

Breakdown #3 occurred the day the tree was cut apart and hauled away. It took a crane, a tree shredder, a mammoth dump truck, and four grown men almost five hours to take her from my world. The last branches to go were the ones I watched every night from bed. I found that cruel, even though I had hidden myself away that morning in a room with little view of her glory and busied myself after that with an errand and a meeting. I arrived home to the crane still lifting huge hunks to the ground.

 

 

I stood at the window and fell apart. The new view was garish and harsh. The shade and the cover were gone. I got it all out, blew my nose, and turned to my husband. “I will not be using the back door or the deck for several days, and I don’t want to hear one thing about it.” Wisely, he said little, which was a comfort. If he’d said something nice, I would have fallen to pieces again. If he had been snarky, I would have turned on him on in anger.

I miss her every day. She was majesty to behold in an older neighborhood of huge trees. During the month before she was removed, we started a couple of small landscaping projects in the front and back yards. Little projects that professionals handled with tidy ease that didn’t even take a week to complete. Just before the projects started, I mentioned to our landscape architect the removal of the tree. He knew we had been contemplating adding another tree in the back yard, and, as my voice broke slightly with the news of the impending loss, he quickly said, “I have the perfect tree, and I’ll plant it.” He knows our property just enough — and me even better — that, as he marked the grass with a spray-painted X, he barely asked for our guidance.

It didn’t pass my notice that the first thing to be done on the Monday they started work was the planting of our new tree. I had been petrified that we would have to start with a leafless twig like our son brought home from grade school on Arbor Day. Our new beauty arrived at already twelve to fourteen feet tall. I should have know better and trusted more that he knew I needed something substantial. She has a long way to go to the lofty goals I have set for her but she is on her way.

I can’t wait until her first branches are visible from the window across from my bed. She will have to grow fifteen more feet, but I’m patient, and she is able.

p.s. There were never enough photos captured of this tree. Words will have to suffice in telling my story.

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