Circle

Six years ago, a very big old oak tree in my front yard fell over.  I came home from work on Friday and the tree was lying between our house and our next door neighbor's house.  It fell in exactly the place where it would do the least harm.

My husband's new car was parked under the big branches of the tree, and at first glance we figured the car was a goner.  The only damage to things other than the tree itself were the very corner of the overhang of our garage roof and a plastic pond that was awaiting installation.  After taking pictures from every angle and having the insurance agent do the same, some branches were cut and gently lifted off the car, which had not one scratch.  The branches fell and gently kissed the car, but didn't harm it in any way.

I loved that tree. I mourned the shade it had given my house and the homes it gave to gazillions of other lives. I cried for days.  Most people didn't understand, but that tree was a friend of mine.  It was the Eastern corner of my four cornered shade bed.

The tree people came and cleaned up the driveway, surveyed the other minimal damage, and while I sat on the lateral trunk of the tree, crying, I gave these big, emotionless men with chainsaws specific instructions.  I really couldn't have cared any less that they thought I was crazy.

I told them I wanted the trunk and large branches cut into two foot sections, that I wanted the mulch piled on the side of my lot, and that I wanted the rootball left as it was.  It took several tellings.  I considered drawing pictures for them, but eventually they did as I instructed.

The corner of the garage overhang was easily fixed, the pond was replaced, and I actually think the insurance company was happy.  Go figure.

Brian, a friend visiting from England, and I rolled some of the larger bits of trunk down the hill to the back yard to begin building the wall for the pond area.  It was quite a sight, I'm sure watching the two of us "mature" people trying to keep control of big rolling logs.

Some of the smaller logs became Faerie Henge.

Others became a wall to begin to level out a shade bed and the mulch had more uses than pickle jars at Heinz.

I chipped away on several of the biggest pieces - the ones too big for me to move - as they softened with the help of beetles, ants, and weather, using the resulting mulch in various gardens.  I hollowed out a few logs one year and planted petunias in them.  As the logs became lighter and smaller, I moved them around, arranged them in shapes that pleased me (and I think them) and gave the neighbors with green velvet lawns something to discuss over dinner.

But the root ball, which became the Eastern corner of the shade bed stayed in place.  A couple of years it held a birdbath.  It often was home to chipmunks and a favorite perch for squirrels who would sit and stare at my front door demanding that I refill the bird feeders.

This spring I leaned against it and found that it was very soft in places.  I brought out my hatchet and spade, expecting to get some buckets of mulch for my newly created paths.  And I did get lots of mulch.  I also got a huge bonus!  I got buckets of black, fine, moist, fructuous dirt.  It was the most beautiful dirt I've seen since I left Illinois.

All the while I was chopping and digging around the root ball, I was thinking of Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree and thinking about what he got wrong - or at least what I had always interpreted wrongly.

This tree, at first glance appears to be down to a knobby bit of root ball and some whittled away, rotten branches making exotic yard art and temporary borders for paths in the gardens.  And if that's all it was, it would be far more than enough.

But this tree has done more to turn this pre-brick, orange clay that passes for dirt here, into something gorgeous to this Illinois transplant.  There is now some dirt in which earthworms thrive and plants grow.  I'm not saying they grow as well as in Illinois dirt, but you know, this tree and I aren't done yet.

I don't look like I did when I was 17. All my cells have been replaced.  And when I "die" I will still be.  Just like the tree.  We really never go away.  We are severed from what we were, but we don't disappear.

  

Adventures, adventures, adventures.  It's turtles all the way down.  I'm so very sad.  And I am grateful.