What the Trees Try to Tell Us We Are

I cannot get too worked up about a tree. And I love trees. I love them more than anything else that grows in the ground: bushes, grass, ivy, mushrooms, pumpkins. I love them far more than flowers. But it's not hard for me when a tree goes down, whether it's felled by wind or lightning, ice or disease. The death of a tree seems to me both quietly awesome and perfectly tree-like.

This morning our doorbell rang at just past seven. It was a tree guy, sent round by the town, asking if I'd move my car before they took down the maple out front. He was with a crew of perhaps seven or eight men, and they had with them three bright orange trucks - one with a cherry picker for the man who'd saw off the top branches, another with a shovel arm to scoop them up, and one with a deep bed to haul away the cut limbs and severed lengths of trunk.

A month or two ago, a white, spray-painted X had appeared on the base of the tree, and from this we guessed it had been slated for removal by the town. I'd felt a kind of rote pang - the pang, I think, due as much to the fact that the tree had suddenly become an underdog as to the fact that trees are nice; and the roteness because I'd never felt a particular affinity for this tree, except in that it provided an ideal stage for the occasional riveting performance by a pair of squirrels whose antics we would take in from the vantage of the front windows of our second-story unit. The kids rallied around the tree a bit. "It's sad," commented the youngest. "Will they cut all of it down?" Neighbors confirmed the significance of the X, and commented on the fact that the tree, which rose some twenty feet above the roof of our house, and which, though hardly lush, still bore leaves, was diseased. It was hard to miss the big hole in its trunk, and the fact that its bark had become increasingly mottled with pale green fungi.

No one from the town ever communicated with us directly, though, and as time went by without any action, it became possible to imagine that the tree's sentence might have been commuted, or at any rate, that it might have been granted a stay of execution. Until today's early-morning arrival of the tree crew, that is, which put the kibosh on this whole line of speculation. Before I'd even finished re-parking the car partway down the block, they'd started cutting. By the time I came back inside, my youngest child - who'd still been in bed when I left - was standing out on our second-story porch, a wool blanket wrapped around his pajamas, nearly eye-to-eye with the guy in the cherry picker, looking stonily out at him and breathing white puffs of carbon dioxide in his direction. He had the appearance of one making a stand, defending his fortress against encroachment, and I thought his gaze, as he witnessed the first long branch hurtle toward the street, held righteous indignation.

All during the rest of the domestic morning rush, while his older brother and sister scurried around gathering themselves, and finally left for school on foot, the youngest kept drifting back to the front of the house to keep tabs on the tree guys' progress. He'd say, "Whoa!" when an especially big limb went dropping through space and crashing to the street, or comment on the snow-like quality of the sawdust that seemed to mill in the air before sinking after it. I don't know whether I only imagined this or rightly inferred it, but it seemed to me this youngest child started out regarding the tree guys as enemy insurgents, and slowly, over the course of a little more than an hour, came to see them as honest laborers engaged in a fascinating task. By the time he and I left for school, a half-hour after his older siblings, he was not in any kind of mourning, nor did he sit in judgement of the crew. He paused, in front of our house, to scuff his feet in the confetti of wood-flakes, which did indeed coat the ground like a dusting of snow, and to observe the one truck relaying its load of lumber to the other, and to wave at the chainsaw-wielder in the cherry picker.

"I heard you can tell a tree's age by counting its rings," he informed me, as I started the car.

"Maybe we can try that after school," I said.

When I got home after dropping him off, the tree guys had already left, taking everything with them but the stump, over which they'd placed an orange-striped sandwich board, presumably to ward off neighborhood kids. I peered at the freshly-cut surface of the stump, examining it for rings, but there were none to be counted. The rot - a large, coffee-colored, mushy-looking stain - had permeated the core of the tree and spread nearly to its circumference: plain evidence that the tree had been done for, chainsaw or no.

I thought of my son's initial sadness, back when we'd learned of the tree's planned fate, and of his indignation when first confronted with the circumstances of its demise, and then his acceptance, his curiosity and equanimity, and his ability to move along so gracefully with it, almost as though he'd let go of caring, as though he were finished contmeplating the tree and would think of it nevermore. But then I thought of the funny thing he'd just said, minutes earlier, when I was idling the car in front of his school - and I knew the tree wasn't erased from his thoughts, that it had, on the contrary, found a deep mark.

"See you this afternoon," he'd said, hopping down onto the sidewalk.

"See you this afternoon," I'd agreed, ready to drive away (he stopped letting me kiss him at drop-off more than a month ago, and I have come to accept that he is not one for lengthy goodbyes).

But he'd paused, then, one hand on the door, perceptibly working something out. "Unless," he'd added, "something crazy happens, and we don't."

Note: The title of this posting comes from the John Ashbery poem Some Trees.