The Trouble with Trees

When the tree fell on our house last winter, it could have been far worse. We were in the kitchen when we heard and felt a sudden booming thud. That frozen moment: what the hell was that — but we’re fine. Next moment: rushing to the adjoining den to see one of our two white spruces up against the windows but the room intact. Then upstairs to see if there was a hole in the roof — there wasn’t. The enormous maple behind the house had broken the 100-foot spruce’s fall, more or less snapping it in two so that the upper part didn’t come down perpendicular to the roof. The tree guys, who arrived within a couple of hours, seemed genuinely stunned at our luck. Not even a shattered window, just some relatively minor roof damage. Despite a rough winter with many episodes of high wind, as on that day, four months later a spruce relic is still lodged in the maple’s upper branches.

We’re approaching the 25th anniversary of moving into this house. In that time, we’ve lost six and a half mature trees to storms, tree aging, and the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle. The half came from a twin-trunked, towering silver maple, the victim of as violent a summer thunderstorm as I can remember. It so happened that we were an hour and a half away, visiting our son at music camp, when that storm hit, and we’d left the 15-year-old home alone. The morning after, an Ozymandian wreck lay across the backyard. “You must have felt the earth shake,” we said to our son. He shrugged.

We’ve introduced only a few new trees. One of the two crab apples my husband planted is lovely in the front yard. As for the other, as it neared its full height, it began to block our view down the backyard and out to the river beyond. He allowed me to murder it one summer day, after one last spring bloom, while he was out of town; he couldn’t bear to do it himself, or to watch. I was punished for it with searing shoulder pain I’ll never forget — what you get from using an inadequate handsaw for a dirty deed.

Some 20 years ago, a Japanese maple I planted was denuded by deer within a week and did not survive. Last summer, a local business was handing out free saplings. After the winter we just had, if any buds appear on the tiny tulip tree that I stuck in the ground, not much more than a chopstick surrounded by green netting to keep said deer away, I’ll be shocked.

But I won’t care that much either. I confess that in recent years, when my husband has suggested planting a maple or an oak here or there, I have responded, What’s the point, we’ll be dead before it’s full-grown. I know this is gloomy and fatalistic, even nihilistic. It’s also true, and I can’t get around it.

The trees that have fallen, the one I chopped down, the young ones that failed — each is a bracing refutation of immortality.

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When we lived in our first house, around the corner from where we are now, our neighbors, Joann and Ted, were a couple from our parents’ generation. They’d never had kids and so had never outgrown the bungalow they’d moved into as newlyweds in the 1950s. In their retirement, they decided to spread out a little with a new, enlarged kitchen and a screened porch. There was just one problem: the star magnolia outside their existing back door, a beautiful starlet dressed in white each spring, would have to go. How Joann fretted about sacrificing that tree, to the point of wondering whether they should cancel the whole plan. But they went ahead.

A very tall tree to the side of our house is dying and needs to be taken down. We got an estimate last summer but decided to put it off. Naturally the tree that did fall on, or up against, our house was a different one — the spruce that was fully alive. What did it was the wind lifting the shallow root system right out of the ground. In “The Trees,” a poem of springtime, Philip Larkin writes, “Their greenness is a kind of grief.” He then asks, “Is it that they are born again, / And we grow old? No, they die too.”