~a column about Jefferson by Colleen O’Brien
Two of my neighbor’s 70-year-old silver maples went down this past week to the woodcutter, the trees rotten to the core. The craggy giant silver maples were brought down because they were old and falling apart in high winds; or crashing to the ground on perfectly calm days, clearly a danger to people and cars and houses. The city marked them as liabilities, and one day pulled up with their front loaders, chain saws and dump trucks and went to work.
I could not bear to watch as the efficient tree men did their felling dance. I could hear them as they topped and trimmed, the thud of great branches hitting the lawn shaking my afternoon. When I finally peered out, there were only two fat trunks 15 feet tall standing forlornly on the parking waiting for the morrow and their ultimate destiny — the chopper.
The giant old gents had been full of holes and jagged breaks for years — branches with no wood inside, just shells; rotting sawdust falling out of great gashes where the trees had twisted in storms of many seasons. Watching the purposeful, methodical removal of trees, especially a couple of noble old boys who’ve seen a lot of action pass beneath their majesty . . . those balmy spring days with the sap rising and their bursting pale green leaves; long summer nights sheltering robins and cardinals, cicadas and crickets, lovers walking hand in hand along the sidewalk beneath; hot summer afternoons shading the family on the porch; the autumn of the baby owls; the countless bleak winters holding up the sky. . . it all broke my heart to watch the old boys go.
I think of the Bob Owens stories — as a young boy his route to school on his bicycle led east on Harrison to Jefferson High, wheeling past these trees who were youngsters, too. Bob tells a story of riding home along Harrison past Oak Street one witching night with a turkey in the basket of his bike, a cold November evening when he was one of the lucky ones playing bingo at the armory to win a live turkey.
That night Bob put the fear of doom in some poor pedestrian’s heart as Bob wheeled awkwardly past him with the squawky bird trying to escape his basket and his grasp. From what Bob could see in the moonless night, he thought the fellow might have been a bit tippled to begin with; the flapping, yapping bird on a bike magnified into a nightmarish scene in the poor man’s drunken stare.
The house where the trees lived on the corner of Harrison and Oak was for years the Price home: Miss Gustava Price, a daughter, was the history teacher to several generations of Jefferson High School juniors. Her brother Don became the fire chief. The lovely old Victorian looks mighty bare now, as all houses do when there are no trees in the front yard. The Prices might have been the owners who had the foresight to plant the maples in the first place. They gave a profound gift to their town in the planting.
At the base of one of the downed trees was a gnarled bowl-like growth that looked like a private pool for fairies. Each morning this wet summer as I walked past, the bowl brimming with dew and raindrops, I smiled the secret smile acknowledging the little people and leprechauns who surey played there in the moonlight.
Where do they frolic now, poor wee folk?
There are many worse things than a couple of old trees being removed for safety’s sake, but everything given its due, these sentinels of the neighborhood, like all of us who are fortunate to grow old, must die, and like us, they deserve a weeping woman, a eulogy and a story or two at their passing.
