Trees

I have always loved trees. I love to look at them and to draw them. I can still remember the weeping willow tree that stood across the street from my favorite childhood home and the primitive water color paintings that I created, featuring that very tree.

So it pleases me that the other members of my immediate family feel the same way that I do. None of us has been ardent enough to camp on a tree branch in order to prevent someone from cutting it down. But we do not easily accept the cutting down of trees.

One of our neighbors was angry with us for years, because we refused to cut down a redwood tree on our property at a time that we were making other changes to our house. Our neighbor claimed that the tree belonged in a forest, rather than in someone’s yard. The tree was there when we bought the house, and was probably there long before our neighborhood was built (sometime in the 1960s). Maybe at some time in the more distant past, there had been a small patch of forest here and that tree is one of the few remaining survivors. Our refusal to remove the tree transformed our formerly friendly neighbors into a hostile border.

Last year, our city, which has long had a reputation for respecting and preserving trees, seemed to get caught up in a frenzy of removing mature shade trees and replacing them with little saplings. Some of the trees were lining a major thoroughfare near our neighborhood and I’m proud that my husband initiated a petition to stop the city from proceeding. He was unsuccessful. The city arborists had convinced the majority of people that it was necessary to remove the mature trees in order to resolve a problem with the roots causing the road to buckle.

Most people didn’t get upset until later in the year when the city in one fell swoop removed all the trees on another street, popular for its small sidewalk cafes. It happened during a heat wave. Suddenly, there was no shade. A major outcry ensued.

Still, it seems that more and more trees are meeting an untimely demise.

Some trees are being cut down out of fear. There was a very sad story that made headline news in our area, where a tree on a street in a neighboring city fell down on a car, crushing and killing its occupants. This didn’t happen during a storm. In this case, the tree really was sick and should have been cut down. So now people are feeling hyper vigilant.

Thus, I could understand why the neighbors on the other side of our home might decide that it was prudent for them to remove the tall Douglas fir that stood for so many years in that backyard and graced the view from ours. One of the workers rang our doorbell to apologize for the debris that would be falling in our yard and explained that our neighbors felt the tree was showing signs of leaning.

We hadn’t noticed any leaning, but I would consider it presumptuous to object to removing a tree that my neighbors considered potentially hazardous to their family.

Nevertheless, we could not help but feel sad to see it go – a task that took an entire day.

Our daughter, Shelli, had slept over the night before and woke up to the sounds of the crew sawing off the tree limbs. Her anguish at losing the tree made her feel a desire to be in the midst of trees.

So she decided to delay running errands and suggested taking a hike instead. I was more than happy to comply.