Cutting a tree

It was a bad tree.

There was no debate about that. It was a silver maple. That is arborist-speak for four seasons of trouble. In spring it shed terrible red berries, then flooded the yard with helicopter-shaped seed pods that filled every garden and germinated at a rate somewhere around 98%. In the summer it hardly cast any decent shade, and its ragged leaves were prone to insect attacks that left them riddled with leaf galls that made it look as if it had contacted some terrible dermatological ailment not seen since the Crusades. In fall the leaves turned a pale yellow, fell, and would quickly compact making them useless as mulch. In winter, its branches and bark snapped off like icicles littering the yard.

Those weren't its only flaws. The silver maple is a notoriously fast growing tree, and our had the audacity to take up this trait with both of its trunks. It sent one straight towards the my neighbor's telephone line, and another towards my cable and power lines. It quickly became not only a bad tree, but a dangerous tree to boot. It had to go.

So, Saturday afternoon, armed with some rope and borrowed chain saw, my father in-law, my neighbor, and I, directed mostly by my wife and mother-and-law, endeavored to take that tree down. It wouldn't be a huge job, but it was more than any of us would have preferred to do. But it was a job that simply had to be done, the same as going to the dentist or filling out those forms around April 15th.

There also was no real emotional tie to this tree, not for us. It was here when we moved in, and it had been a nusiance ever since. On his first visit here, one of my uncle-in-laws suggested we "prune the (expletive) thing, about two-inches off the ground, and be done with it." For much of the last three years we'd regretted not doing just that.

This isn't to impugn the entire being (if you subscribe to the belief that a tree is a being). It did have some good qualities. I fed the goldfinches thistle on that tree. And they, in turn started a thistle farm in my back garden bed. During the cicada summer of 2007, it was host to thousands of 17-year-cicadas. Now, hundreds of their offspring are likely getting their last sips off of that tree's roots. Our son loved that tree, the way young people do, for its height, and its ragged, weedy majesticness.

But a strange thing happened as we began cutting and snapping away limbs. It demanded its place in the yard. With each piece that disappeared from the sky, taking its spot littering the lawn a woody corpse, a bit of emptiness opened above my land. Instantly, it was missed. Increasingly my yard become more and more open, more naked, more exposed. I suddenly had a view of my neighbor's garage that I never really wanted, and the powerlines that line the alley came into sharper view. My neighbors suddenly received a clearer view of my yard as well. I too, was stripped.

That tree, the bad, dangerous tree, had managed to make itself missed.

As I worked Sunday to clear the yard, burning most of what could not be cut and stacked, more than one bird flew by to give me an earful. The sparrows came first, then goldfinches, and finally a lone black-capped chickadee. Each of them wanting me to know my action was too totalitarian for their taste. A squirrel chattered at me from the alley. Even Moxie, my terrier, wasn't sure what to make of the stump. "The tree. It's not tall anymore," my son told me.

That tree will be replaced. We have big plans for the space. We see fruit trees. Three will be able to go where that one went before. The birds, I'm sure, will appreciate the new trees, as will the pollinators. I fear the squirrel will like them as well, and Moxie will welcome the return of the squirrel. In time, they too will grow and obscure the garage and the power lines, they will become our new green fence, the new distraction to draw our sight up towards the sky. In time, the bad tree will fade, like the hole that has been made by its absence. But for now, I'm missing it, even if it was a bad, terrible, dangerous, no good tree.