Requiem for a Willow

December 12, 2021--the next morning.

If there is an argument for starting and keeping with a blog, it’s the opportunity it gives you to go back in time, to read what you were thinking fifteen years ago. To pull up short with a start, realizing that you’re where you were wondering about ever being.

 And you can never imagine what will  happen to you, nor can you imagine how it will feel when it does. Here’s a historic post I want to hearken back to, because of what happened on December 11.

 

Written Aug. 21, 2006

 

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield

We planted this willow tree when I was pregnant with Liam. It was about six feet tall, a slender whip, its small leaves backlit by the evening sun. We tried to plant it far enough away from the septic tank that it wouldn't dip in for a drink, far enough away from the deck so it wouldn't touch when it grew up.

We had no idea.

 

The willow is seven now, Liam is six. He is long and lanky. It is enormous. By next summer, we will be able to reach out from our deck and touch the willow's branches. I've no doubt it will be in the septic tank by then, too. It is full of birds and it buzzes with cicadas. It is a citadel of foliage, a city of birds and insects. It's a habitat on a trunk.

 

What a metaphor for starting a family, this willow tree. So much bigger, so much grander, so much more wonderful, so much scarier and all-consuming than you ever could have imagined. The willow overspreads half the back yard, at seven. What will it be at 25? Who will Liam, he of the wooden trains, be at 25?

                                                                           

    End of Post

 

 

So I asked, and how could I know then that this willow, then vibrant, healthy and seemingly intent on taking over the entire backyard, wouldn’t quite make it to 25? 

 

December 11, 2021. At 3 AM I was up, looking at a line of storms on the Weather Channel, stretching from Ontario to southmost Texas. I wondered what fresh hell was being unleashed in that swath. Seventy-six people would lose their lives in Kentucky, and three in Tennessee, from a monster tornado that barreled more than 200 miles in one horrific rampage.  I couldn't know that, but I knew this was a real stinker of a storm. It was lying like a nasty python, writhing a little, but not moving east much at all--just slithering away in place. 

I padded around the house, guided only by flashing lightning, in my age-old ritual of unplugging things. There’s lots less to unplug now that I don’t watch TV or have a landline or a fax or give a toss about my ancient stereo—let the lightning take it! I unplugged my laptop, looked for Curtis and couldn’t find him, which meant that he was probably in the basement clothes closet, like a smart dog. That was where I ought to be, I thought, but I dragged myself back to bed and fell asleep, to the distant rumble of thunder and the wind tearing at the useless, flapping weatherstrip in my bedroom windows. 

 

On this Saturday morning, I had planned to paint all day on a Christmas commission that’s been eating my time, but I couldn’t settle down. I was so nervous. The wind was wild, wild! and rain was going sideways.We'd been under barrage from the storm-snake since 3 AM, and it was nearly 12 hours later.  I put my car in the garage and did little things around the house. I looked at the radar again, to see this storm that wouldn’t leave us alone, and saw a perfectly straight line of orange, like a samurai sword, raking across the Midwest.

 And in the next heartbeat here it was, with a white-out of rain and the trees groaning and tossing. I ran from window to window checking on the greenhouse; I ran up to the tower, came back downstairs and it was there in the studio that I heard it. It was a soft fwumpp, not loud enough to jump up to investigate, but resonant, and I would glance out the south window, off the high deck, to see the sky, once blocked, suddenly opened out, and the great black trident trunk of the willow on its side, Just. Like. That. 

No fanfare, no crack, no crash, just a muffled sound like someone sliding a couch across carpet, and it was done.

 

I took a photo of it lying there against the sodden meadow and bruised sky and sent it to Liam and Phoebe and Shila and my three sisters. I had to share it with them first, the way one would share the death of a relative. I feel abashed even writing about it, knowing what happened in Tennessee, Kentucky, and four other states, but here it is, and I need to tell you about it.

 

The willow had cracked off at the base, but there was barely any root left. This was not a surprise. I knew it was dying, had known it for years. It had stopped growing. I used to have to trim it three times each summer so I could even mow under it without being strangled by its long whippy tentacles. I hadn’t had to trim those whips for the past four years. 

 

 

My first reaction was gratitude that the giant tree had had the grace to fall sideways, and not crush the deck or the house. After the hollow gut punch, I feel strangely numb about losing this tree. Maybe because I’ve been on deathwatch for so long. But mostly, I think, because I will confess that as a native plant enthusiast, I had never really wanted a weeping willow in the first place. Bill insisted that we plant one for sentimental reasons, because he spent his early years with one at the "Rickety House" in Pella, Iowa, where he was born. I was pregnant with Liam, due to burst in a couple of months, and his insistence wore me down. We went and picked one out at Thomson’s Landscaping. It was a whip about 6’ tall, probably a couple of years old. It had been a terribly dry summer, and there had been periodical cicadas in plague proportions, too.  I knew I’d be the one hauling hose out to it, and I’d be the one who picked up countless dropped limbs and mowed under it, too. But we had no sooner finished arguing about what was too close to the septic tank (My position: Any place you could pick is too close to the septic tank to plant a willow)  and finally dug the hole and stuck the whip in it, and stepped back to survey our work, than a palm warbler landed in it, wagging its tail! That makes it September, 1999, because September’s when the palm warblers come here. I remember the sun coming through the willow's leaves, and the bird’s tail wagging, and Bill and I took it as a good sign, a very good sign.

 

Liam was born only a month and change later, on November 8, 1999, and of course we called it Liam’s willow, and I became fond of it in spite of my misgivings about its eventual size and thirstiness. As he grew, long and tall and beautiful, so did the tree. It was a vireo magnet, the warbling and Philadelphia and blue-headed vireos catching in its branches during migration. 

Blue-headed vireo, 25 Sept. 2020. Immaculate bird. And I note that even the branch it's on is cracked.

The cedar waxwings adored it, swinging merrily in its flexible top branches, when it had them. Everything wound up in that tree, including the flying squirrels who sailed from there to the deck railing to skitter around and filch sunflower hearts from a feeder we used to keep there. 

 

My boy grew up knowing he had a tree that was special to him, and that is something, and if I regret losing it, it’s because of Liam. “This makes me so sad,” he responded to the photo I sent the day it went down. Me too, son. End of an era. But don’t take it as a sign. Weeping willows grow far too fast, and die too young. It’s just the way they’re built. 

 

I miss the surreal touch the willow lent to the landscape, especially when the gardens were in full, fantasy-land bloom (here, on October 8, 2021). This is one of my last photos of the tree, and you can see the dead top that tells you it’s not going to be photogenic much longer. Even the color of the leaves tells you something you don't want to know.

October 8, 2021

 

December 11, 2021

Change of seasons, change of backdrop, pretty draconian. 

Still, I’ve checked a few times, and my sadness on losing this tree is not even a pinprick compared to how I felt about losing the centurion red oak that guarded our mailbox. She fell on March 26, 2011.  The post is here. http://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com/2011/05/leaning-tree.html

 

That tree’s death heralded the end of an era, too. I can’t even begin to tell you what all fell with that oak. We were coming back from a huge recording session for our first Rain Crows album, “Looks Like Rain,” when we saw it stretched across the road. But it wasn't just the tree...absolutely everything was changing right beneath our feet. That tree, I wept over for days. I couldn't bear to look at its mighty trunk down on the ground. Strong, tall, beautiful, useful, still willing, but doomed by heart rot. I still grieve her loss, still miss her. What an incredible presence she had, a destination unto herself.

Then...my favorite photo almost ever

Now-thankful to have Curtis and this still-spindly oak child. 

The oak that sprang from one of her acorns is growing fast near the very spot she once commanded, and it is a beautiful young tree. I had to cut its protective tomato cage off --I think it's too big to be under threat from the township mowing deck now. Still too small to cast shade, it is hurrying to fill her place in the world. 

 

What will I plant where the willow was? I will think about that. Something native. Something I have always wanted, though I don't yet know what that is. A little grove of serviceberry? More persimmons? Another clump of birches? Something more monumental? Not a redwood, that much poet Jane Hirshfield and I know. Suggestions from tree mavens are welcome. 

I've got someone coming to deal with its enormous carcass, and I've asked them to bring a bulldozer, too. It'll be a heck of a day. I have visions of myself trotting in front of the Bobcat, pointing at things that need to be cleared out. There is so very much to do, and a dozer can do in seconds what would take me weeks to clear. I'm looking forward to that. But oh, Liam. I waited for you to get home. I needed another picture. 

Then...August 2006 

                        

and now (December 20, 2021). 

How he has grown, shooting past the railing he once stretched to reach. What he has faced in his short life. And what a beautiful soul he has in that strong lanky frame. Trees come and go. People do, too. He learned that far too young. 

I will plant something wonderful in that hole. It's a way to move on.

Talking to the Neighbors

As I continue to recover from surgery and shingles, feeling around to find my strength and wellness again, I'm slowly upping my hours and miles back to something that feels normal. I try to surpass 10,000 steps per day. It feels so good to cover some ground again. I'm not sure when running is going to feel right again. Hoping it will. Ankles hurt all the time. Not sure what that's about.

For now, I'm in hiking boots, slogging through mud and over tussocks.

If the morning is fair, which it all too rarely is, I hurry out to catch the sunrise. 

I can never capture it to my satisfaction, but trying is fun. There's the corner oak that marks the east 40 on our property. 

If I capture the land, the clouds suffer. 

If I capture the clouds, the land suffers. Still, digital phone cameras are worlds better than my little film Pentax and Canon AE-1 used to be. Dawn's always a challenge. 

On my way out to the sunrise I stop to see Ellen, or what's left of her. She's still lying in the field where the coy-wolves dragged her, the same one where she fell. Just a ribcage, a spine, a leg and a hoof. 

She'll be gone with the first hay cut, just some hard bits of bone in a hayroll somewhere.

This is why I need Buffy, Flag and Pinky. I need them like I need breakfast and hot tea.

I need these wide landscapes and softly smiling skies.

And oh, I need the sun, the shadows. It's been behind gray blankets for far too long. My friend Scott called them "dryer lint skies." Just about as inspiring as dryer lint, too.

But on a sunny morning, well, anything's possible. My brain works a lot better.

The base of an oak reminds me of a mountain slope with trees creeping up to timberline. You look at a distant mountain in the West, and you can't believe how tiny the huge trees look, straggling up its flanks. You try to imagine walking out there. That's what this oak bole brought to mind.

The bark of another oak, a fresh amazement. How can the code for this corky structure be contained in the DNA of cells? How does it form so characteristically by species, into perfect runnels and ridges?

Set back from the new fenceline is a row of old posts, relics. Someone strung them with barbed wire while they were living trees, and the wire cut faces in them as they struggled to grow around it. I saw a moai god, come to Ohio. Rapalachian cow scratcher. 

I'm delighted to see the neighbors coming up out of the woods.

I haven't met them here this time of day.

The lone Holstein heifer takes herself a good scratch on the log god. Looks like he's saying Ooh Ooh Ooh.

I can see much of it is worn smooth from such daily attention. This is why I can't put bluebird boxes up in cow pastures. They'd get scratched and leaned and pushed right down.

This little Hereford bull calf is so adorable in his heavy fur coat. 

And I'm charmed by the markings on this one. Look at her bib, the spot between neck and breast; the particolored ears. Cattle are dead easy to tell apart at first glance. Whitetails, not so much. 

You can look at her stance and see something's going on here. She arches her back and cuts a luxuriant fart, doing her part to add to the world's methane.

In the woods, another little sprite pauses to look back at me. 

A smart person won't fall in love with beef cattle. Happy to be dumb then, blundering my way through others' hayfields, hanging on their fencelines, talking to the neighbors.

They're Drilling My Forest

There's a lot of stuff going on in Washington County Ohio, home of the much-vaunted Marcellus Shale, that upsets me right now. Every morning I wake up to the sound of huge industrial chainsaws ripping into a big patch of timber just two miles from our house. Two miles might sound like a long way, far enough, but I assure you it's not. Fifty miles might do it. But not two. For a woman who thinks nothing of running seven miles, two miles is right next door. I hear the saws snarling all day long, through the windows. I can't get away from it. But it won't last long. They'll be done soon, when the forest is completely gone.

That forest had yellow-throated warblers, American redstarts, hooded warblers, common yellowthroats...box turtles, red foxes, and once even a bobcat, that I saw eating on a road-hit deer. It had a newt pond, where the kids and I went a lot in the spring to see the newts floating, mating, swimming. It had everything. And I loved it, as I love all good forest.

Chet's so young he still needs a leash! And the kids...oh my. 

The newt pond. Going soon.

Sorry about that, newts. 

There was an old farmhouse there, with a porchlight that was always on, and of course I loved it too, out of all reason. I shouldn't have loved it so, because it wasn't mine, but that never stops a true old-house romantic.

I loved all the different coverings, real and faux, that covered its old log-cabin bones. I knew there was a log cabin under there. And there was. I'm told somebody dismantled it and took the logs for his house. Well, that's good. It didn't go completely to waste.

I loved all the greens on the porch. June 22, 2014. Wasn't Chet so beautiful then? 9 1/2 years old, before I gave him Nexgard, thinking I was protecting him from ticks. But that's another story. God, he was beautiful. And so was that house.

So were the outbuildings, with their ragged skirts hanging. That place was never so lovely as it was in a light rain.

The sweet old guy who owned the house, kept it up as best he could, mowed the lawn better than we mow ours, well, he died, as sweet old guys will, and his brothers up and sold the place and in came the oilmen.

Now there's a stoplight on our road. A stoplight!

A temporary one, but still.

There are hundreds of feet of pipe, and bulldozers.

They've torn down the house, 

and they're tearing down the outbuildings. They've left this one. I don't know why. Certainly not because it's beautiful. What do they know of beauty?

Beauty's just in their way.

They walk around in their neon shirts and hardhats and I snarl as I roll slowly by.

Here's what the same lot looked like this evening--only three days later. Oil companies work fast.

All that useless beauty--it's just in their way. They've got to put in the drilling rig, get to that oil. Gonna be some cement poured where there once were warblers and box turtles. Gonna be kleig lights on 24 hours a day, and drilling, drilling, drilling. This, the snarling chainsaws, is the good part. This is the quiet part. They'll drill hard and long, around the clock; they'll pump brine with God knows what chemicals in it between the layers of shale (but none of that is going to get in our groundwater, nossir, it's perfectly safe!!) they'll put up a huge stack, and the natural gas they release will shoot up that stack, and it'll burn for months with a ferocious crackling roar that one oilman I spoke with told me that he loved. Because, he cackled, rubbing his fingers together under my nose, "That's the sound of money!!" Well, it's more the sound of profligate waste. They burn off that gas, and it doesn't heat anyone's house or cook anyone's food, because it's under such pressure that it's dangerous, so they just burn it away. They're after the oil, not the gas, though God knows a lot of people could use that gas to heat their homes in winter. Just haven't bothered to figure out how to harvest that wealth from the earth...in too big a rush to suck up that oil. 

The flame of utter profligacy will light up the sky all night long, and it will light up my bedroom, two miles away. And I will hear it all night long, two miles away. I'm lucky it's not right next door. Maybe that's coming too. They keep us all on a need-to-know basis. Like, "Hello. We're leveling this forest, and we'll be putting up a drilling rig here, so you might want to move. Or you could stay, and listen to the sound of money. Our money." 

My friend in this house right next door to what was once forest knew when to get the hell out of Dodge. I saw him loading the last things from his garage into the back of his truck yesterday. I wanted to stop but he looked so stricken I honestly didn't know what I would say to him, so I kept driving. Now I know I probably won't see him again, and that hurts. They just ran him out. And who's going to buy that nice house? Nobody, that's who.

They've slapped a NO TRESPASSING sign on the little shed. Like they need to tell me to keep away from their moonscape. There's nothing left to trespass for. LONGVIEW ACRES, it says, with a sweet little Christmas tree drawn on the door.  View just got a lot longer. No trees in the way now. The newt pond's right below that shed. I pretty much know what's going to happen to it.

I sat down to write a post about the places that heal me, but I had to wade through all the photos I took as I drove out to get there. Being a photojournalist, albeit a bloggy one, I felt compelled to record this, too.  Devastation is what's going on in my life right now, so this post is what came out. I know you come here to get your dose of nature and peace, and no matter what has gone on in my personal life, I have provided little else but that for 11 years now. It pains me greatly to have to show you this. If there were something I could do about it, I would have. The greed is too powerful to stop. Everyone around us fell all over themselves to sign away their deep mineral rights to fly-by-night "companies" that blossomed like honeysuckle all over Ohio, promising riches to people who could sure use the money. We didn't sign, but that doesn't matter now. We're surrounded on all sides for miles around by those who did. The ever-changing companies move like amoebas, splitting and coalescing; the person you speak with, or even the company he worked for won't even be there a month later; they don't have to pay us anything now to take the oil right out from under us. They've achieved critical mass, and we're screwed, without the money to compensate us for our sorrow and pain.

I came home tonight in the gloaming, had to come through the fire, and emerge proofed by the flames. And on the other side were the Three Graces, waiting, their fall colors shivering in the last light, one mile from home, and one mile from the moonscape. A fragile bulwark indeed.

Not yet cut down, and may they never be...but one never knows. Sometimes it seems to me that being something Zick loves slates you for destruction.

I came up the sidewalk and looked at this little tableau of maroons and purples and greens that I'd created by our front door

and I thought, well, that sure is beautiful, those 34-year-old bonsai trees putting on a show for me, with the recalcitrant morning glory just beginning to bloom at the end of October, the Thunbergia vine gone wild and throwing little yellow flowers all over the boxwood hedge

and I pressed my nose against the warm lit kitchen window and saw Liam, just home from rowing crew, sticking his nose in a carton of Goldfish, taking a sniff, and deeming them still OK. He tipped the carton to his mouth and caught a glimpse of me standing there, staring in at him with a slightly clownish look on my face

and that scared the bejesus out of him, and he held his hand to his heart and gave me the finger, then started to laugh

and I laughed and laughed. Life goes on, and it is beautiful, but Lord, some of the stuff that happens in between is hard. 

UPDATE: There's a move to put parcels within Wayne National Forest, Ohio's only national forest, up for auction to private oil and gas drilling/fracking companies. Now's your time to get on the phone. I just called Regional Forester Kathleen Atkinson, who has full power to take this land off the auction block, and Sen. Sherrod Brown to register my objection to the rape of national forest. In the current maelstrom of dismantling and destruction, cries for sanity must be louder and longer. This link: http://www.acfan.org gives you all you need to know to make two phone calls. Thank you.