Featured image: The maple had to go before it fell.

Cogitation 30 Saturday 06 October 2018   The maple tree in our back yard needed to go.

Two arborists examined our dear maple. One of them injected it with two dozen vials of medicine in the spring, but the leaves on the failing side did not respond.. By winter the snow and ice could split it in two.

We had it cut down this week.

The tree, A Norway maple, had shaded our house in the morning, given cover to birds and squirrels, and greeted us daily with a welcoming out-of-doors sensibility. For more than 35 years we watched it grow from a volunteer seedling into a mature tree. On Monday, a crew from Dogwood Hills Tree Farm expertly cut it down.

Gone is the maple’s treeness.  Gone are the leaves that would soon turn a golden yellow. Gone is the sense of a backyard friend for human and for animal. Gone are the qualities that make for a living tree.

Thankfully, the neighbors will saw up limbs and trunk for firewood. The stump will provide a base for a flower container. Still, despite the practical uses for the maple, a living piece of nature has gone. The removal enhanced our view, but shrouded a part of me.

A friend, Ray Schlegel, at coffee on Friday, softened my lament with these consoling words: “It is still a tree. It’s a tree-plus.”

There are poems and songs about trees. Sermons about trees. Scientific data about the role of trees. There are precious stories about special trees in one’s life.

When I was in my early teens I had to prove to myself that I could climb a tall tree in the back woods of our family farm. I shudder at the memory of the danger it posed, I climbed a partially branchless tree–might have been an elm or oak–and caught my breath at the top. No one ever knew, until now. Why? It might have been a climb of discovery, self assertion; I don’t think I was trying to be Hercules. I just did it; shimmied up and back down to solid ground.

It may have been part of engaging my own treeness, something whispered through tree leaves or soughed through oak branches in winter.

Some trees stand for ages, others pass.

 

Goodbye friend

 

I’m almost at a loss for words, just like the long-ago seminary student of Spurgeon. The teacher had students come forward to give an extemporaneous sermon. One student opened the note on which he was to preach and all it said was, “Zacchaeus.”

The student thought for a moment and then delivered his sermon: “Zacchaeus was a little man, so am I; Zacchaeus made haste and came down, and so do I.” Whatever we do, it’s good to think on one’s feet, maintain a sense of humor, and avoid being up too many trees.

 

Gathered with some of the siblings and spouses

 

Tall ancestral trees line a road in southern Michigan

 

Good example of tree education in New Hamburg, Wilmot Township, Ontario

 

 

Our maple in its once autumn treeness

 

 

Blessing

Last Sunday we attended the wedding of Sarah and Jonathon. Three clerics led the ceremony. We witnessed the formation of a new family tree, a new tributary, a new commitment to share God’s peace with each other and the world. We celebrate the blessing of newness in all creation.

Peace.

-John