The giving tree for real
I live in a corner unit. The wide side of my house – 6 windows total on 2 floors - faces a lawn with a big locust tree. It’s given me shade in summer, someplace beautiful for the snow to frost in winter, green to look at in other seasons. Its leaves blew in the breeze. It cast wonderful shadows and made great sillouettes (two of my favorite things). It gave me privacy from the neighbors across the parking lot. It framed the parking lot so it was much prettier. It gave me birdsong.
There are trees in this village that are huge. Some of the biggest city block trees I’ve ever seen. Some truly majestic beauties. Several had over 50 birds nests in their branches last winter. One, in the Spring, was almost deafening in the volume of its peeping. Arlington Village is known for its beautiful trees.
This particular tree wasn’t so big and beautiful, maybe. But it had two things going for it:
- It was mine.
- It never dropped a branch.
That last is important. When Dennis and I bought our beautiful home in Montclair, it had a gigantic pin oak tree in the front yard. That tree framed the house. It embraced the front of our house. We were told that it was an historic tree: the third oldest pin oak tree in New Jersey. Verified by both the Department of Agriculture, and the records that are kept of such things at Rutgers University (which is in New Brunswick, home of Joyce Kilmer who wrote “Trees”).
The day we moved from our apartment in Rutherford to this home sweet home, Dennis went ahead with the truck. I followed a couple of hours later in my car.
When I pulled up, there was a pile of fresh cut logs in front of the house. “How nice,” I thought. “We’ve got firewood already and it’s only September.” I LOVED our fireplace. The fact of it. And the twin window seats built in on either side. A wall filling rectangular mirror framed in dark, crude Mexican pine hung above the fireplace. It was the ‘70’s. Dark Mexican pine furniture was very popular among young couples furnishing their home for the first time, the way IKEA would be popular now. We had a lot of it.
The pile of logs was the result of one of the tree’s 30’ branches dropping to the ground, blocking traffic (a misnomer given the number of cars that ever drove down Warren Place.) When he drove up and discovered this horror, Dennis had called a tree surgeon who came over while I was blithely cleaning up our cozy little nest in Rutherford and saying good-bye to the red enamel-walled kitchen that had served as my darkroom, the dining room that was my art room, the living room that had featured Denny’s drummies.
In the time we lived in that house, the tree dropped another big one. And a couple of others threatened to fall. We had the tree wired up. We had it fed, pruned, cared for and watched like a hawk. Anything to keep it going. After we separated and sold the house, the new tenants didn’t want to live in fear. They had the tree cut down to a stump. The house looked awful. I was glad I didn’t own it anymore. And I was sorry for New Jersey. I wondered whose tree took 3rd place after our tree was cut down to nothing.
This story of this locust tree is not as dramatic. Still. It was part of my rental and I prized it. Over the almost six years that I have lived here, the tree’s branches have been dying so that this year there was no foliage on the upper 2/3s of the tree. Up there, the branches had become bare and naked. Bare naked.
The bottom third of the tree was still growing normally, doing what it could to uphold its responsibility to the neighborhood. To MY home in particular.
Today they took it down. It took about 5 hours. Four men did various tasks, like climbing the tree with a huge saw in one hand; like throwing ropes up to the guy in the tree so he could affix them to the branches that were coming down. Like sawing up the branches when they hit the ground, and putting the resulting logs into the chipper.
I could not watch the branches being amputated. When the noise of the saws and chipper stopped, I knew the deed had been done, so I looked outside. It looked like the model for Shel Silverstein’s book, “The Giving Tree.” It was nothing but an old stump. Bare naked, squat. Wounded looking.
I never liked that book. I felt that the tree was a martyr, and I didn’t like that concept. It was all noble and everything about what it gave to the little boy. Yes, yes, I know that the boy responded appropriately at each age and stage of the game, included ongoing lack of gratitude and youth’s sense of entitlement. And that the tree just kept doing the best it could. It felt maudlin. It felt more biographical than I wanted to admit.
I did not have to watch the Montclair pin oak being chopped down. We had sold the house and moved out by then. So I didn’t see the bare nakedness of the front of that house until many months later when I drove by it for old time’s sake.
But this locust tree? I was there when it happened, all the way up until the final solution. I didn’t watch, but I felt the shame.
The men are coming back at some time to dig up the stub and roots. That means that the sidewalk, which had been bubbled up by the wide reaching roots, will probably be repoured. Everything will look nice and tidy.
On the bright side, there will be no more bird poop on my car every morning. Sometimes a lot of it. Always unsightly. But a kind of badge of honor and a link to nature: everyone who saw my car knew immediately what had caused the white splats on the navy blue sedan. Everyone then knew that I didn’t park in a garage. That I was therefore possibly unable to pay for a garage and therefore had to park outside. All that is pretty much true. But what’s also true is that I liked walking to the car that was parked outside, past the bushes, past the grass, looking up at the tree. Sky.
I felt a sense of ownership, like a Scottish laird surveying his property. Everything passed my inspection every time I walked to or from the car. Every time I looked out the window. I knew it was morning before my eyes were open because of the avian chatter. That was a lot for a tree to give. I can only hope that the tree somehow knew that it was appreciated, even if The Grounds Committee of Arlington Village sentenced it to death.
Quite a lot to write about a tree I’ve only known for fewer than six years. Imagine what I could write about a friend of 64 years. Or about a piece of jewelry that’s been in the family for 80 years. The tree may have autobiographical application to my life. But there’s a whole lot more to my life than any single tree. And that’s the upside of this situation: I have been reminded of my fortune and I have now herewith written my appreciation. Good tree. Nice tree. Thank you for your generosity tree. Your givingness has been noticed and valued.
And while I’m at it: Good life. Nice life. Thank you for your generosity life.
The whole thing and all of it has been and still is noticed and valued.