The Leaning Tree

 Yes, she had a distinct lean to the east. This is my last photo of the great red oak, taken on February 26, 2011. It's a perilous lean. But she'd been leaning for years, and I told myself that that's what some old trees do.

 A couple of times Bill mentioned that he thought she was leaning worse than he'd ever seen, and I had to agree. I took a couple of photos to document it. I guess we both knew the end was coming.

 That little noose hanging down is a remnant of a tire swing that our neighbor Gail, now in his 50's, said they swung on as kids. It's a steel cable. The stories this tree could tell...

When the original owners of our homestead had a thriving orchard, with apples, peaches and bing cherries, they used to put a big keg of cider out under the oak with a dipper and a box for collections.

 February 7, 2011. A pearly morning, the oak standing sentinel, no tracks yet on the clean white page of the day.

Saturday, March 26. Bill, Liam and I are having a Rain Crows weekend in Lakeside, Ohio. We're recording 14 original songs for a demo, having the time of our lives. Phoebe is staying in town. No one is home to witness it. The tree goes down. This is what we see when we come up our road on Sunday, fresh from a weekend of music and friendship.

There are no words.

She's fallen, and the town crews have cut her in half and swung the gigantic stump around so she's not blocking the road. And there she lies to this day.

The next morning, Phoebe and I went out as to a wake, and I shot her against the sunrise. Bluebird box and mailbox miraculously intact. She was a lady to the end.

I came again and again to her, especially after a light snow settled to soften the starkness.

It took four days for me to be able to look on her without weeping. Now, a kind of numbness has settled in.

Waiting for the bus is not the same. It has a sadness, one that only increases as the days begin to warm and she tries to leaf out from fallen twigs.

 Chet Baker makes the best of any situation. He enjoys climbing on the oak's carcass.

That little dog knows how to cheer Mether up. He poses shamelessly.

Find Chet Baker in the photo below.

Yes, you are a magnificent doggeh. And I would like to be more like you in spirit, but I am human, and I grieve.

 Do not grieve, Mether. It is a tree, and it fell down, and now it is a jungle gym.

Here are the roots. You can see the brown rot, presumably wrought by the chicken-of-the-woods fungus.

At the end, she had barely any roots to hang on, barely any heart inside.

All the neighbors tell us that the first eight to ten feet of this tree is absolutely full of metal--fencing, cables, spikes... making her extremely dangerous to process with a chainsaw.

So there she lies. A local guy hacked away at her for a little while, then quit. We don't own the land she's on, so it's hard to figure out just what to do with a carcass weighing many tons and run through with metal. But she's a hazard where she is, blocking our view of an increasingly busy road. She needs to go.

I would like her gone. I would like to be able to replace her with a strong young thing, to not be reminded each time we approach or leave our home of just what we've lost in this beautiful tree.

Many have suggested making furniture out of her...thank you. We lack the technology to do that, but perhaps we'll find a way to salvage something. We're not there yet, not ready for the new puppy. We miss the old dog too much.