Sipping Wine & Staring at the Space Where My Tree Used to Be.

Honoring the gaps where something once was.

I’m still in shock a bit, but color helps, wine helps, and once I sit down and commit to it writing always helps, too.

It was a shock to return home from what I fondly call “Oldladyville” last week to find the tree I have come to know quite intimately over the last 20 years hacked down to a stump about 2 feet high.

Even now as I sit here, a beautifully plumed magpie lands in my bare rather raped-looking yard, lamenting the loss of that tree.

I feel you, beauty.

And I am sorry.

I imagine she may have had her nest up there, there was one, it was ratty and hung over my neighbor’s yellow, paint-stripped trailer attached to a branch that was clearly dying. That is what I was told, was that the tree was dying, that it was “becoming a hazard”.

I understand up here (points to my head), but not here (points to my heart). A full week later I miss my tree. 

That tree was here before my mother bought this little tin-roofed cottage, colloquially called a trailer, more than 20 years ago. It was here when my daughter was a toddler, and we used to lie under the branches that swept over more than half of the yard from the lowest point. We used to sleep under it, dragging the cushions off the lawn chairs and pulling my mother’s thick woolen blankets, that she has collected over the years, from within the house.

There was less light pollution then. We could see the stars through the branches and the high desert nights were just cool enough to need the blankets when the wee morning hours would steal over us just before dawn.

That magpie is now on my roof.

Her cry is different than usual. They often screech and they love harassing my cat, Odin, and he probably deserves it. But this is different. This is an inquisitive cry, “Where is it?” And this makes me want to cry. I did when I first saw it. When I pulled up to my yellow yard, covered in sawdust—my own shock matching that of the landscape. I had grabbed my dog, Freckles, called a friend and bawled my broken, hippie-heart out to her.

She got it, so many people who I have shared this loss with have.

Many people have commented about trees being cut down or torn out by freak storms, sometimes hundreds at a time. There have been so many forest fires over recent years, too. When I drive over the hill to where my lover lives I pass the burnt out reminder of the fires that scorched that mountainside a couple of years ago in the form of hundreds of trees dotting the landscape like so many upright blackened needles. 

So many of us have lost beloved trees and, in the greater collective landscape—entire forests. Enormous, sometimes ancient beings clear-cut in the name of progress. That pain you might feel when you think about this has a name: solastalgia. It is described as the overwhelming sense of grief for the loss of land, forests, plants, species, and ecosystems.

We are ecosystemic in nature, and we cannot truly escape this. It is such a short time that we have begun to “civilize” ourselves, and not all for the best of it. We are children displaced from our Mother, just like the many critters who used to nest and play in my tree are now scattered around the neighborhood—we, too, are scattered and uprooted.

I put my hands on the stump.

I put my hands on that bare, shorn chunk of wood that used to be my tree, that used to shade me from the heat of day, and protect me from the often undesirable energy that is emitted from my neighbor’s trailer. 

I miss my protector.

For days I kept my door closed and my blinds drawn. I usually keep it all open this time of year, and thanks to my tree I have always felt comfortable wandering around my house in various states of undress.

Not now. Now, I feel exposed.

I feel as exposed as that shorn stump that, when I touched it, I could still feel the life in. Life drained out of it, roots drying up, and the grass around it barren and yellow.

Not only did I feel exposed, I felt guilty. Could I have done more? Should I have watered it more? Was it my fault?

I know that all things have a life-span, even trees. 

Maybe this tree had lived its life and it was just its time. Maybe. When I had spoken to my trailer court manager earlier in the day, with the arborist right there, we had spoken of pruning it back. So when I left for work to go to my caretaker’s job with chainsaws buzzing and an actual wood-chipper pulled up to my house, I had expected to come home to it severely pruned—but not gone.

I was deeply hurt, and a little betrayed; this was not what we had spoken of. I called the manager to ask why no one had thought to warn me, but he, himself, did not know until the following morning. So I made a choice to emotionally let him off the hook. I know he is not a gratuitous tree-murderer, and I told him so. But not having someone to blame does not actually ease the grief, nor my sense of shock or loss of privacy.

We will plant something new. And for now me mum bought me a lovely barrel of mums—consolation flowers.

Maybe we’ll plant hops for now to make an immediate screen, a wall of hops climbing up from the ground towards my roof, sheltering my porch, and a tree next spring. I would like something with “flaming” in the name—a willow or maybe a maple, in an ideal world, both.

It comes in waves, as any loss does. 

I look out at the pile of firewood that will burn in wood stoves this winter when it will be brutally cold here, and I know that the energy of that tree will be giving back life in a different way. I  look at the stump and I miss my tree. Though there are little shoots growing where once this behemoth dominated my yard, it is still so bare. And whatever we may plant will take years to root, spread and eventually offer an umbrella to my little tin cottage.

Maybe it is that way with any gap in our life. It will be there a while as it is, and eventually it will be worn down, and something new will grow in its place.

Lots of love,

~Justice