trees: dead & dying

or, what I can no longer see through my window

Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash

I sit in my office, staring out the window at trees that are no longer there. They’ve been felled by impoverished roots and villainous vines and—ultimately, inevitably—a sharp and fatal blade. What remains are woodchips, scraped over the earth, uneasy bedding for a phantom grave.

The trees that I see through fog and memory are tall and spindly pines, needles browning, graying, limbs drooping ever downward, bearing the unwanted weight of intruders. The vines masquerade as leafy green saviors, spots of color in an otherwise black and white photograph.

The trees that I see block out the sun and the heat. They stand as a formidable wall against unwanted elements. They give the illusion of forest. They give shelter to bugs and birds and to the hidden poison that killed them. Phantom limbs now dance about in a breeze that blows unhindered.

Their loss is felt, and I see that, too: a different memory, a different moment. A birthday party, a slip-and-slide, dirt transformed to squishy mud and the stillness of dead things shaken by giggling four-year-olds and the sloshing of water balloons.

And there, in the shadow of the trees that remain, a dozen parents drawing nearer and nearer to one another in the heat and the dwindling shade.

And me: I feel compelled to come clean. “There were trees,” I say. “Just the other week—a whole row of them. We used to have plenty of shade. But now—” And I shrug, purse my lips together, offering an apology unasked for. I gesture at the obvious.

Our guests smile and shrug and cling all the more to their water bottles and sunscreen.

But I wonder—as I sit and stare at what is no longer in front of me—about this need: an impulse to name the thing that’s gone. A need to lament its passing and the aftermath: the heat and the sun and the sweat.

It was different once, a voice whispers. But no longer. Things have changed, and now we huddle together in the little shade that’s left.

And the woodchips sink into the dirt and the grave gives rise to newly sprouted and uncertain hope.