Shift

I sit at my kitchen-table desk on this damp morning in early March, watching my landscape evolve in stop-motion. A crew of tree specialists arrived just after breakfast to remove four trees from the garden. One of the trees, an old and dusty yew, has been slowly poisoned by a gas leak after utility work in the street some years ago. Its dry limbs and dessicated body are swiftly disposed of, leaving the first of many new spaces that will greet me when I look out of the window. A tired but feisty mimosa tree that struggled to offer us a few feathery pink blossoms last summer has been efficiently felled and in its place lies a pile of surprisingly fresh, blonde logs and a gleaming, oozing stump. The mimosa was planted twenty-five years ago and withstood a hurricane and many other New England storms; some years ago its two major limbs began to part ways and neither was destined to survive the split. At the end of last year, a biblical thunderstorm precipitated its demise: the following morning the bark began to peel in scrolls from its trunk faster than I could collect it and wonder at it. I gradually stopped noticing it and casually tossed the detritus in the corner of the garden where dead branches go to rest. A graceful weeping silver pear tree did not survive the weight of the snowfall. It slid to the ground and stayed there, its lifeless branches slowly spreading and pooling across the mud and grass. Along with it came an unnamed tree that knew only how to grow taller each year. It barely bore leaves, let alone blossoms, but who knows where it might have ended up as it began to compete in height with the maple and the river birch in a bid to preside over the entire garden. The tree was never given a name. The former owners of our house referred to it as The Junk Tree. My husband in his humor perpetuated that moniker but it never sat well with me. In my private lexicon the tree, plain though it was, was always part mystery, part miracle. Trees or weeds that grow from random, passing seed, unplanned by humans, have their rights and have the right to recognition. But no matter where it came from it is gone now, and next to where it grew is a single, small, still naked viburnum tree that marvelously resisted the weight of both of the larger trees that fell on it. Now that the heavy deadwood has gone the viburnum springs up to the light and shows promise of greening once again, come spring.

Once the major felling is done, men in orange hard hats and earplugs clamber like monkeys in the treetops. They climb higher even than my sons climbed as children — two little boys and their friends, rigging precarious swings and secret tree houses in the arms of the sycamore maple. These men are unsung athletes, stretching their arms and legs long and wide as they test the healthy tree limbs for safe scaffolding while their power saws make quick work of dying or encroaching branches.

The sky is dark with a shifting raincloud. The thunderous, giant orange chipper on the truck vibrates the kitchen windows, gobbling huge chunks of timber and spewing out the dust of what was once my morning view. The revving of chain saws and grinding of the chipper makes me anxious. It feels as if an apocalypse is playing out before my eyes and seeping through the pores of my perception and into my head. I decide to take the dog out for a walk since her sanctuary is off limits for the morning. And I need time out from my vigil.

I spoke to the crew as they sat on the wide stump of the mimosa for their morning coffee break. This is my lesson in embracing change, I said wryly to no one in particular. They acknowledged my comment with a smile and a complicit but kind laugh, and they pointed out to me the beauty and tenacity of the splendid and healthy trees that still populate the garden. I like these men. They chop hard and fast and prune judiciously and thoughtfully. Their respect for my landscape and for their own work is tangible. I am grateful. When they have left I will walk through the garden and reacquaint myself with it. I will reach down to sniff the raw stumps of the trees. I imagine myself collecting branches and twigs intended as mementos of this moment in the garden’s evolution, but I will soon forget where they came from and what color they once were, and I will toss them in the corner with the other deadwood, and watch instead for the greening of spring, and wait for what arises.