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We planted it almost exactly a decade ago on an early-Spring weekend when trees were on sale and the ground had barely begun to warm. “Does it have to be this weekend?” he groaned, as I dragged him out of the house with a full day’s plans of shrubbery-acquisition and installation in mind.
I gave him the bullet-point list of why it did indeed have to be that weekend, citing several future commitments as well as my wish to get the greenery growing in our barren new neighborhood.
He trudged with me through nurseries, giving undisputed (though sullen) approval to each purchase I wanted to make. At home, he helped plant the tree we’d chosen for the front yard. “Is this deep enough?” he asked repeatedly.
“Deeper,” I kept telling him, eventually taking over the shovel when his small enthusiasm gave out entirely.
In the space of ten years it went from a mini-tree to a creature some 25′ tall, happily situated in a place where it gave both shade and privacy to the front porch. Until last week, when a mercurial storm changed from “my-it’s-getting-windy” to “what-was-that-crash?” in the time it took us to set dinner on the table.
I’d foolishly allowed the tree to develop a narrow fork; I knew it would be weak but I lacked the courage to correct the issue when the tree was young. The fork gave way during the storm, leaving one half of the tree upright and the other half smashed across the driveway.
This depressed me horribly, and not only because I would have needed to sell my body (or a small assortment of its parts) in order to afford professional tree removal services. It depressed me because one more small part of our union was gone.
The cats who were our children before we had children are gone, set to be replaced by a pair of clownish boy-kitties in a few weeks’ time. “Oh, you rearranged the living room,” he says in surprise. “Why’d you do that?”
“Just time for a change,” I answer, and quickly turn back to fixing dinner. And now the tree is gone, and if a new one is to take its place, it will be selected and planted by only me.
Everything we built, bought or created is passing away. Watching the steady, slow deterioration of things that were ours drains me. The losses cumulate into something like the fall of an empire.
The tree is already cut up and to the curb. There will be more trees, of that I have no doubt. And anyway, it’s just a tree.
It doesn’t have to be a symbol of failure.
aag
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