SIGNS OF LIFE IN A DYING TREE
/The Boston Globe
BEVERLY BECKHAM
It is not the prettiest tree. A big, gangly oak, it blooms late and it blooms slow and every spring it leaves a thick layer of pale green pollen all over the driveway and the cars and the newly washed windows.
And I have thought, many times, I wish we had a maple in the front yard instead.
I see it from my office window, not the whole of it, just the trunk, thick and scaly and speckled with lichen. Even when you look up, there's nothing wondrous about it. It's full of broken limbs, leafless branches, and pale, unremarkable leaves.
It used to have a grander companion, another oak, which was big and leafy and majestic. This one sat closer to my office window, and I would watch squirrels tightrope-walk on its sturdy limbs and birds sit and squawk on its slender branches and the neighbor's cat prowl greedily around its massive trunk.
When it died 10 years ago, I was stunned because I hadn't noticed that it was leafless at the top. All I saw was what I saw from my window: an umbrella of leaves, and squirrels and birds playing.
"A tree dies from the top down," the tree man said, standing in my yard and pointing. "That's how you can tell it's in trouble. Look at the top."
I look at the top of my lone oak and see that too many of its branches are bare. I thought it was safe. I watched it bloom this spring. I checked on it every morning from the second floor, certain that pellets and sprays and human intervention that my intervention had saved its life.
But it is Cinderella in tattered clothes compared with all the belles of the ball up and down my street. I see this now because everything else is in bloom, thick and rich and effulgent. And its leaves are sparse and dull, and last week when I spread mulch around its base, chunks of its bark fell off in my hands.
When the bigger tree died, the tree man came and cut it down, not in one Paul Bunyan swoop, but little by little with machines that trembled and screeched and a rope that wrestled this beautiful giant to the ground. Limbs fell, dozens of them. And then the tree was just a trunk, sheared and bare and empty. And then its trunk was cut down, too. And in the space where it had stood for years and years there was now only air.
Its last standing companion is not nearly as grand. But it has stood sentinel over my house for years. It shades my walkway. It protects my flowers. It holds the memory of my children standing in its shadow as they sold lemonade, as they waited for the school bus, as they spun and somersaulted and cartwheeled across the lawn.
This tree gave them leaves to jump in and branches for snowmen's arms. And when they went to all their dances and their proms, it was this tree that was the backdrop for their pictures.
I have lost trees before. A mountain ash that was an offshoot of a tree that was smuggled from Scotland by my mother-in-law's mother. A majestic pine that was a landmark, so tall it could be seen for miles. Two weeping willows that were in the back yard of the house where I grew up. Two dogwoods. Three scrub pines. And the big oak that was companion to the oak that is dying now.
But losing this tree is hardest of all.
The American Forestry Association says an oak tree in a rural setting lives 150 years. But in urban areas its life span is reduced to 60 years, and in cities it survives only 13 years.
My tree was born in the woods. Now it lives on a main street. It's old. Its world has changed.
I know how it feels.
I climbed a ladder and tied yellow ribbons to its branches on Jan. 20, 1981, my 13th wedding anniversary and the day American hostages were released from Iran. My husband climbed a ladder every Halloween to hang a giant fake spider trapped in a huge web of white yarn. My daughters once had pretend weddings under its then-canopy of green.
I see its trunk from my window. I walk outside and look up at its pale leaves. It is an old tree. I can't keep it from dying. But I can honor its life by remembering all that this humble tree has given to the world and to me.
