Eulogy for a Tree
Nov. 23rd, 2013 06:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firebyrdI loved my third grade teacher immensely and I periodically visited her until I graduated from high school (even having to chase her down to a different elementary school). When I was in the fourth through sixth grades, the visits were more frequent due to closeness. One spring afternoon when I was in fourth grade, I admired a vase of pussy willow limbs she had in her classroom. She gave them to me since they were from a bush in her yard and she could just get more. I gleefully took them home and put them in a vase there to enjoy.
I have vague memories when I was in kindergarten of believing that pussy willows would grow if you just planted a stick in the ground, but by age ten, I knew better. So when one of the sticks started developing roots, I was excited, as I knew that this was a way to actually get a pussy willow bush. I asked my mom permission to plant it in the yard, and apparently thinking I was an idiot, she granted me permission (she claims that she just thought it wouldn't grow, but my memory of it suggests it was humoring the idiot child in much the same way we nod and smile when Enoch says he's going to marry my mom when he grows up). In all fairness, while I was right that it was a viable clone, I was an idiot, because I planted it about a foot away from the house.
And it grew. And grew. And grew. It thrived and was beautiful and I loved it.
Some six or seven years later, my stepfather was around and he'd had it with this ten to twelve foot pussy willow growing against the house. He insisted it was growing into the pipes, one of which had burst in the basement over the winter. I doubt he expected to get the full fury of a teenage girl's wrath when he said he was getting rid of it. Oh, how I carried on over that tree. I don't think I had all that many breakdowns as a teen, but that was one of them. He agreed to try to move it instead of just destroying it. It was a kind and reasonable compromise, in retrospect, but I wasn't happy with anything short of a full pardon, because I was sure it was going to kill it. I knew a bit about the microbial suite that lives around the roots of plants and attempts as a child to dig up and transplant things like wild roses had been failures, so I was convinced it was all doom and gloom. I snipped not a vase, but a bucketful of branches to try to get another clone going to replace my beloved tree. The day of execution came, he hooked it up to the minivan, and yanked that decent sized tree right out of the ground before re-planting it in a corner of the yard away from the house (and I will note there was no evidence of it having roots in the pipes).
And it grew. And grew. And grew. It thrived and was beautiful and I loved it.
While I believe some of the branches I saved sprouted roots, they all got tossed unused, because my tree was saved. And boy, was it happy to get out away from that house (did I mention I planted it on the /north/ side?). With so much more access to sunlight and space, it spread its branches out in all directions and then went straight up, well above the roof of the house. Other than one strange summer where it suddenly had some bizarre, triangular shaped bugs in masses over chunks of the trunk (which I promptly went avenging angel with bug spray on-HOW DARE YOU THREATEN MY PUSSY WILLOW!) and some scarring from the straps tied around it for its relocation, it was healthy and never needed any attention beyond an occasional pruning to save the roof from its eager growth or to allow a mower under it. Its only flaw was that as it went from bush to genuine tree, the pussy willows mostly grew way out of reach as a silvery haze in the top branches rather than on the lower branches where we could enjoy them.
Then Thursday night we had an awful windstorm. At my current house, there were times it sounded like the wind somehow managed to wrench the storm doors open and then slam them back shut, it was so wild. My mom's house is fairly near the mouth of the canyon and 95% of the time, when we get wind, she gets it much, much worse. The pussy willow hadn't exactly had a strong central trunk initially, rather having three similarly sized branches that eventually grew together as it grew larger (I'm not sure if that's a species trait, though an unrelated pussy willows I mail ordered that I planted in my yard is similar, so I suspect it is. It was /supposed/ to be pink, which is why I hadn't just gotten a start from my beloved tree in the first place). In the twenty-two years since I planted it, it had weathered the nightly canyon winds without a problem, not to mention many strong windstorms and even a tiny tornado or two, but Thursday's proved too much for it. That grown-together trunk finally proved to be a fatal flaw and it split apart under the force, thankfully only taking out the neighbor's fence in the process.
We're going to try to get some starts from it going. In fact Enoch's teacher, upon hearing the story, wants a start for his classroom. I'm afraid the tree was probably dormant for the winter and the attempts won't be successful. And yet, I'm finding myself not upset. Maybe it's just because my mom told me when I was in the throes of a twenty-four hour virus and so it still seems unreal. But maybe, after the last threat to my tree's existence and all the carrying-on I did then, I've learned to trust that it will survive and that it will once again grow and thrive and be beautiful again.
I have vague memories when I was in kindergarten of believing that pussy willows would grow if you just planted a stick in the ground, but by age ten, I knew better. So when one of the sticks started developing roots, I was excited, as I knew that this was a way to actually get a pussy willow bush. I asked my mom permission to plant it in the yard, and apparently thinking I was an idiot, she granted me permission (she claims that she just thought it wouldn't grow, but my memory of it suggests it was humoring the idiot child in much the same way we nod and smile when Enoch says he's going to marry my mom when he grows up). In all fairness, while I was right that it was a viable clone, I was an idiot, because I planted it about a foot away from the house.
And it grew. And grew. And grew. It thrived and was beautiful and I loved it.
Some six or seven years later, my stepfather was around and he'd had it with this ten to twelve foot pussy willow growing against the house. He insisted it was growing into the pipes, one of which had burst in the basement over the winter. I doubt he expected to get the full fury of a teenage girl's wrath when he said he was getting rid of it. Oh, how I carried on over that tree. I don't think I had all that many breakdowns as a teen, but that was one of them. He agreed to try to move it instead of just destroying it. It was a kind and reasonable compromise, in retrospect, but I wasn't happy with anything short of a full pardon, because I was sure it was going to kill it. I knew a bit about the microbial suite that lives around the roots of plants and attempts as a child to dig up and transplant things like wild roses had been failures, so I was convinced it was all doom and gloom. I snipped not a vase, but a bucketful of branches to try to get another clone going to replace my beloved tree. The day of execution came, he hooked it up to the minivan, and yanked that decent sized tree right out of the ground before re-planting it in a corner of the yard away from the house (and I will note there was no evidence of it having roots in the pipes).
And it grew. And grew. And grew. It thrived and was beautiful and I loved it.
While I believe some of the branches I saved sprouted roots, they all got tossed unused, because my tree was saved. And boy, was it happy to get out away from that house (did I mention I planted it on the /north/ side?). With so much more access to sunlight and space, it spread its branches out in all directions and then went straight up, well above the roof of the house. Other than one strange summer where it suddenly had some bizarre, triangular shaped bugs in masses over chunks of the trunk (which I promptly went avenging angel with bug spray on-HOW DARE YOU THREATEN MY PUSSY WILLOW!) and some scarring from the straps tied around it for its relocation, it was healthy and never needed any attention beyond an occasional pruning to save the roof from its eager growth or to allow a mower under it. Its only flaw was that as it went from bush to genuine tree, the pussy willows mostly grew way out of reach as a silvery haze in the top branches rather than on the lower branches where we could enjoy them.
Then Thursday night we had an awful windstorm. At my current house, there were times it sounded like the wind somehow managed to wrench the storm doors open and then slam them back shut, it was so wild. My mom's house is fairly near the mouth of the canyon and 95% of the time, when we get wind, she gets it much, much worse. The pussy willow hadn't exactly had a strong central trunk initially, rather having three similarly sized branches that eventually grew together as it grew larger (I'm not sure if that's a species trait, though an unrelated pussy willows I mail ordered that I planted in my yard is similar, so I suspect it is. It was /supposed/ to be pink, which is why I hadn't just gotten a start from my beloved tree in the first place). In the twenty-two years since I planted it, it had weathered the nightly canyon winds without a problem, not to mention many strong windstorms and even a tiny tornado or two, but Thursday's proved too much for it. That grown-together trunk finally proved to be a fatal flaw and it split apart under the force, thankfully only taking out the neighbor's fence in the process.
We're going to try to get some starts from it going. In fact Enoch's teacher, upon hearing the story, wants a start for his classroom. I'm afraid the tree was probably dormant for the winter and the attempts won't be successful. And yet, I'm finding myself not upset. Maybe it's just because my mom told me when I was in the throes of a twenty-four hour virus and so it still seems unreal. But maybe, after the last threat to my tree's existence and all the carrying-on I did then, I've learned to trust that it will survive and that it will once again grow and thrive and be beautiful again.
