Trees

The majority of my windows face east towards the dawn. Outside these second story windows were two trees. These trees were old trees; at least 100 years old. They towered high above the houses on my block; they were the view from my windows. Were. For the past 15 years I watched these trees and their inhabitants and visitors. They marked the season changes. They were full of birds and squirrels. The pair nuthatches that took turns emptying all of the sunflower seeds from the feeder lived there. The creepers who circled the trunk in search of bugs. The northern flickers and downy woodpeckers that came to the suet feeder, the clouds of american goldfinches in their bright yellow spring coats that inhabited the canopy for those few days in spring, the raccoons that slept off their nights in the mossy crooks high up in the branches in summer. My crows. They didn’t live there, but they patiently perched on the branches as they watched from above for the peanut window to open. Or to catch their breath after chasing off a red-tailed hawk. These trees that shaded my turret in summer, where you look out the window and just see green. Their branches bare in winter. Now all there is is empty sky.

When the pandemic hit, my whole house woke up before dawn. This wasn’t they way things were, but now i wake up before dawn, and look out the window every morning, and watched the sun rise through the branches.

I’m not exactly sure when the trees started to die. It happened slowly, but last spring they had less than half of their leaves. Leaves that never quite matured. Then the heat dome happened, and most of the leaves just cooked. It was obvious all summer that the trees would need to come down. If even one of them fell, they would take out more than one house. Their disease could spread to the other trees on the block. It was inevitable, but the right thing. What I wasn’t prepared for was just how upsetting it would be to watch them being taken down. It took the team of arborists 6 days. The first couple of days were the canopy, and the smaller branches. It rained sawdust. All the birds fled; i heard no one singing anywhere nearby. The worst was day three when the took down the trunks. They towered twice the height over the abandoned house across the street. Chainsaws took them down in chunks; my house shaking as each one crashed to the ground. Then it was over. Two huge stumps covered in sawdust. So much sawdust. Sawdust covered the street, and all the houses. It was dark when they finally left for the night. I crept out and crawled under the caution tape to push away the sawdust and lay my hands on the stumps. They were over 3 feet in diameter. One was beginning to hollow out at the center. They needed to come down. It was too dark and they were too covered in sawdust to count the rings.

I’m glad I did this, because over the next day the arborists ground out the stumps. Now in their place are two new saplings. My crows came by to check them out yesterday. I think they approve.