NEWFANE — The trees around our house once seemed solid and permanent to me, but lately they appear to be in motion. The first to go were the big white pines across the road. There were 50 of them at least, the biggest perhaps 80 or 100 feet tall. They were probably no more than 70 years old, but there was a stillness about them that felt timeless.
All my neighbors wanted to do was let in a little light. There must have been a miscommunication with the people they hired to do the logging - plus the fact that prices for timber have been so high.
Having watched my husband working with a chainsaw in our wood lot, I sometimes think the work of felling trees - when the saw is cutting well and the sweet-smelling sawdust is flying - has a momentum of its own that is hard to stop. In any case, many more trees were cut than anyone appeared to have intended.
I was away the day it happened. When I drove up at dusk, our entire hilltop was in a state of agitation and disarray.
My neighbor was out staring at the raw, altered landscape. His wife was in the road, wringing her hands. I stopped when I saw her.
“They weren't supposed to cut so many,” she said.
I think I mumbled something like, “Nothing can be done about it now.” What else could I say?
As I sat there trying to absorb what had happened, three deer appeared - a doe and two fawns we'd been watching all winter on their daily transit past our house, through the pines to the wetlands at the bottom of the hill. They bounded out of the woods into the road, and we watched them discover that the pines were missing.
The doe stopped short in front of my idling car. The fawns leapt ahead of her, then zigzagged back and began bolting around the road in frantic circles. Finally, they found the part of the pine grove that was still standing, and they disappeared into the shadows.
* * *
Once the pines were gone, I began to pay more attention to the trees in our own yard.
Two summers ago, it struck me that something was wrong with the red maple near our house. The leaves looked pinched, a little small. Too much sky seemed to be visible through the crown. Then in early June, the tree unleashed a blizzard of stunted, winged seeds, as if in a panic to reproduce itself.
It seems incredible now, but I once considered cutting that tree down. It was just a sapling when we moved here, but it dominated a spot where I wanted to plant perennials.
“That's a soft maple,” our neighbor Irving told us, in a way that made it seem a lesser tree than a sugar maple. Red maple is a fast-growing species, opportunistic, generating less heat as firewood, though it is a star in the autumnal color show.
As it turned out, our son spent much of his childhood in that tree. Looking back on the years he was growing up, I see myself walking up our driveway with a load of groceries or my briefcase. I would hear his voice, squeaky at first, then deepening as he moved into high school.
“Hey, Mom.”
I would look up into the tree and find him in its uppermost branches. We would talk a while before I went into the house.
“You be careful,” I'd say. I never would have let him climb so high if time and nature had not tricked me. The tree was so small when he first started climbing it! Before I knew it, they were both up above the roof.
Now our son was away at college, and his tree was in trouble. Was it a sign? Ever since I became a mother, I have been subject to irrational worries. Remember the potted flower in the movie E.T. which wilted when the little homesick alien's heart was breaking?
I called him up (my son, not the alien).
“Are you okay?” I asked anxiously. He assured me that he was. “I think your tree is dying,” I told him.
“Maybe you can do something to save it,” he said.
I called up Bill Guenther, our county forester, and he stopped by to look at it.
The prognosis wasn't good. His guess was that the damage had occurred during our construction project a few years earlier. A red maple is less able to seal off an injury than a sugar maple, he explained.
* * *
When the maple tree goes, the whole garden will change. What shall I plant in its place? I've been thinking about a pear tree, though a part of me wants to opt for something faster-growing.
“Plant a pear tree for your old age,” they say. Or for someone else's children.
My neighbor Irving says the butternuts where our house lot meets the road were fully grown when he was growing up here in the '30s. I wonder who planted them. They've been dying for years. (There is reason to fear that all of our butternuts are dying.) Why did it take me so long to begin thinking about planting new trees to take their place?
The two Norway spruce saplings I planted in their midst the summer before last are still only knee-high. Someday, if they make it, they'll tower over our yard like two grand giant ladies in wide-bottomed ball gowns with graceful, drooping sleeves.
I'll be long gone by then. But maybe when the wind is in their tresses, they will whisper above our clearing about the family that once lived here, and the little boy who grew up in the maple tree.