I was up early this morning, earlier than usual considering I’ve now broken the habit of beating the sun out of bed.
By 4:30 I was wide awake, but warm and comfortable, so I stretched out in the dark nearly an hour more to think about the day of change in front of me, one that I had anticipated with equal amounts of cheer and dread.
Although I am sounding rather dire and grim, all I really had on my mind were the tree trimmers who were to be at my place by first light. We were to see rain moving in sometime after noon, so they were coming to try to cut and trim as much as they could before it got wet. It was a project I have had planned for some time, and thought about way too often.
If all works out well, my old barn will be transformed this winter. An Amish friend has agreed to straighten the sagging relic and cover it with metal siding.
I put a roof on it 40 years ago, by myself, for in those days scaling a ladder with sheets of tin in hand and slapping red paint along the eaves 25 feet in the air didn’t much worry me. If I tried either now, I would probably become a statistic, earning a bit of print on the second page of this newspaper, perhaps.
Before the barn work, I needed to have the trimmers come to cut down an old wild cherry tree and a much healthier and younger walnut; both were tall and straight, but they bothered me. The first was clearly on its last legs, grown together with what remained of a big decaying elm that died years ago. I could push a shovel handle into the base of its trunk and could see a split growing month by month up its side. It was perhaps 60 feet tall, and even a bit of wind out of the east or south made me sweat to think of it.
The walnut had grown healthy and reasonably straight, but its branches reached out from my neighbor’s yard to shade the barn, something I used to welcome. But he, like me, had also tired of the walnuts falling in his grass, this year’s harvest a bumper crop. Day after day from mid-summer to late fall, we heard the green then black fruit dropping off limbs to bang like cannon fire on the metal roof. Thankfully, he agreed that it needed to go while I had the trimmers here. Just this past summer a limb from that tree blew all the way across the barn’s roof to hit my little writing cabin, so it was encroaching on sacred space.
Although I planned to have eight other trees trimmed, and one more — a smaller red pine — brought down, the two trees near the barn were important to me and will be missed.
My children played under the cherry with two friends, the younger brother and sister of my neighbor, when their parents lived next door. It, in particular, was an oasis to the too-numerous squirrels we have on our place, and to the variety of woodpeckers who had drilled in it in too many places to count as they searched for sap and fat black ants. Of course, it also provided us with shade — although a little less of it each year — and as a country kid who grew up without air conditioning, I have always appreciated that.
Years ago, I had to move toy trucks and bulldozers away from the base of those trees to mow, and not long ago I took one of the best photographs I have ever taken, one of a big red-shouldered hawk as it sat on an amputated and snowy limb of the dying elm. Even then both trees were slowly being reduced to mostly sawdust; surely they only stood because they were leaning on one another for support.
The bigger limbs of other trees that reach out across my house’s roof and driveway will be missed too, for even though it may just be the thought of change that I most fear, I also feel I hardly have the right to cut into a living thing, even if it threatens my asphalt shingles or my often-opened wallet. Just to hear the breeze move their leaves was a comfort to us, and the sawdust from their cutting fell on our shoulders like snow.
Interesting enough, another friend posted a story from an online newsletter on his social media page that featured the thoughts of William Blake, the innovative and cranky and often ignored English painter and poet. As quoted in “The Marginalian,” it was in the summer of 1799 that Blake traded a series of letters with the Reverend John Trusler, a man who had commissioned Blake to illustrate one of his manuscripts. Yet, Trusler had also grown critical of Blake’s unique views of nature and religion and art, and the two traded their opinions.
Blake wrote in one letter: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
Although I studied a bit of Blake’s poetry in college, and taught a little of it in a few of my classes, I have never really taken the time to try to understand him much. But I think I can comprehend what he conveyed in that letter, even though I lay no claim to being a “man of imagination” at all.
I speak about those now-gone trees like they were brothers, and I am sure our hard-working and friendly trimmers, my neighbor, and my long-suffering wife, grew tired of my obsessing over something that clearly needed to be done. But the trees, particularly like the ones my children grew up with, like those that shaded us and provided a safe haven for our bluebirds and chickadees, were simply more than green things that stood in our way.