Leaves And Losses

Every time I go home (and by “home” I mean the farm where I grew up – even though I’ve now lived away from “home” twice as long as I lived there) I’m saddened by the blank space now occupying the area where a giant maple tree once stood. It’s more than a hole in the ground, it’s a hole in my heart.

There were two trees actually – one on the north, and one on the south side of the house, and both were immense. The smaller tree on the south actually lived longer–it was a tenacious son-of-a-bitch–standing for years after being split in two by a bolt of lightning. Defying all odds or logic, the surviving side stood like a sentinel by the driveway, a scrawny, matchstick half-tree, leaning precariously to the east, its shattered sliver of a trunk stubbornly refusing to acknowledge reality or gravity and fall down. For five or six years it stood there, and every time I saw it I thought, “A good, stiff fart should blow that tree over.” But through hell and high water, it never did.

Until one day I came home and it was gone.

The tree on the north was at one time the largest sugar maple in the state (we had it measured and listed in the DNR’S Big Tree Registry) with a circumference around its trunk of over ten feet, it stood 90 feet high with a crown spread of some 80 feet. It was a giant. And home to one heck of a tree house.

Its enormous limbs stretched out nearly parallel to the ground making for some great climbing...you could actually run along them. And from them, a boy could jump onto the roof of the house or garage (although you couldn’t get back again). Amazingly enough, although there were opportunities galore, I don’t ever remember anyone falling out of that tree. Its spirit enveloped and protected us (and laughed with us as we spun ourselves silly on its swing).

One summer day, I was sitting on the deck when my dog began to growl. Curious, I walked over to look around the corner of the house to see what was causing his distress. Nothing looked amiss, but I could hear a crackling sound like someone walking through dry leaves – odd, because it was mid July and the nearest dry leaf was somewhere in the Sonoran Desert – when with a mighty CRACK! one of the main branches tore loose from the tree, limbs and leaves crashing down around me. As it fell, it clipped the corner of the house sending a seismic shudder through the structure, and in a rather telling comment on my accident-prone nature as a youth, my mother’s first reaction was to look up from her book and say, “What on earth did Joe do now?”

It was the beginning of the end, the tree was shot through with rot. And although my dad tried to remove the remaining branches that threatened the buildings and leave the rest, the damage to the mighty tree’s soul was too severe. It too, was gone within a year, another erased and yellowing page in the ledger of my life that used to be written full of laughter, pirate fights, secret meetings and pre-teen espionage.

Sigh.

George Harrison said it best. All things must pass.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to see that empty spot in the lawn.