The Tree Next Door
A story about a tree I love.
The first time this plumeria tree shows up as a photograph on my phone is January 25th, 2016. It’s taken from a low-angle, and it’s hard to make out where the branches end and leaves begin, but it cuts a sharp outline against the sky. It looks like black lace, the insides of a lung, or maybe a series of clustered peacocks.
After that first photo, hundreds more fill my camera roll.
Some of them are taken on crystal clear days — the light falls just right, and you can see each vein as it splits pinnately from the leaf’s midrib. Other times, I’m in a hurry to leave the house, and the tree becomes a blur of bright pinks and mossy greens set on fire by the nearby street lamp.
Despite the fact that the tree belongs to the neighbor — its roots dig itself firmly into a corner of their garden — I come to think of the tree as ours.
When Snapchat finally appears on my radar in late 2016, I realize that I have a means to share the beauty of this tree with a whole new audience. My friends receive photos of the plumeria tree with the sun spinning through its branches, or a sliver of the moon peeking through its leaves.
I document it obsessively across early mornings and humid afternoons — in the dead of the night with only orange lamp light humming across the broad, even leaves. I catch the shadow it casts across our garden wall and the curves of its stems.
Once, I manage to catch it in the rain.
Its newly fallen flowers press their petals into the concrete of our driveway and I have the sudden urge to decipher what they’re trying to say, as if the plumeria tree has learnt morse code just for me.
From August 2017 to April 2019, my camera roll is curiously empty of the plumeria tree. I’m abroad, studying at a university in Canada — far from any location tropical enough to sustain the sweetness of nighttime plumeria.
Still, I got to see the tree from home — in my absence, my sisters began the ritual of documenting the plumeria tree. They send me a snap every morning, just as they’re about to leave for school. Even an ocean away, and reduced to the size of an iPhone 6 screen, the tree is beautiful.
But only ever seeing it through a screen after years of tangible interaction dulls my reaction to the tree. With each ‘good morning here’s the tree’ snap I form an increased apathy towards it. My eyes scan over the tree disinterestedly, wandering across the shape of the leaves and registering no change or movement.
Overexposure to the digital plumeria tree sticks it in a box with Schrödinger’s cat. It’s certainly not dead, but I don’t view it as alive anymore.
Cut to summer 2019 — I am at home and my interest has been caught by the Bucida molineti trees. To my sheer joy, the B. molineti trees (which I’ve colloquially termed ‘umbrella trees’ due to the circular spread of its branches) have exploded with growth. Once shorter than me, the tops of them can now only be seen from the second floor.
For weeks, I photograph the umbrella trees and the way their shadows rotate around them like a clock with one hand.
During my first thunderstorm of the summer, I watch the heavy rain pull leaf after leaf from trembling trees. In the aftermath, our grass looks as if it’s coated with gleaming beetle wings.
Every now and then — when the light is particularly striking, or when I notice my sisters taking a photograph of the plumeria tree, I grab a photograph of it too. But mostly my interest is pinned to our newly fruiting papaya tree, the reach of our bougainvillea, the bitter ginger flowers…
It isn’t until my mother sprints into the house that my attention refocuses. Her hands are moving faster than the words spilling out of her mouth: ‘Come take a photograph of it before it disappears! They’re cutting it down!’
I malfunction, struggling to figure out what ‘it’ could be. When my mother disappears back out the front door, the plumeria tree blooms — sharp and bright with all its peacocks perched in its branches.
My feet take me outside in the blink of an eye, and my phone is already raised to catch a man up in the branches of the plumeria tree. He’s holding a long knife and tapping, patiently, at the places where branch meets trunk.
There are no churning chainsaws or whine of metal as it bites into wood, but it cuts through me all the same.
For a long, bittersweet moment, the plumeria tree is wholly alive. Today it is half cast in light, half in deep shadow. I mechanically take photos of the tree. One. Two.
My mother is not taking photographs, but her fingers are worrying at her phone as she argues with the gardeners. They’ve been hired by our neighbors to clear and cement up the garden to avoid maintenance costs, and the gardeners insist that the tree is included in their order to clear the garden. And besides: ‘It isn’t like they want to be cutting the tree down.’
My hands and feet move on their own accord. Three. Four. FiveSix. A video, for good measure.
When the phone call finally comes through, a series of worried words cross from owner to gardener, and the knife is put down.
I take another photo — seven — and put away my phone.
