…time to see what perished during the chilly months and what’s bursting into bloom.
As spring comes every year, I’m haunted by the ghost of a cherry tree that flourished in our backyard when we moved in almost 40 years ago. It stood between us and the sunset, celebrating every season—dusted with white blossoms against morning-blue skies in spring, offering leafy relief from the summer’s sun, a riot of yellow for fall, and lacework branches across cold winter clouds. Nary a cherry for us — the birds owned them all: robins, wrens, blue jays, hummingbirds, and crows that argued with our cat, who sat in the window and watched them all with chattering teeth.
It was a three-trunk tree—or were there four? Each 18” across. Those were the years when all the photos we took included children. Smiling from the window of the treehouse Jake built in the cherry. Swooping in the swing that hung from an outstretched branch. Sending messages and treasures along a pulley from treehouse to deck. No pictures of the tree itself.
But the tree stood proud, controlling the upward and outward aspirations of a Port Orford cedar—probably planted by one of the birds. The cedar huddled at its side, cramped and crowded.
The cherry had seen the turn of two centuries and was the biggest in our neighborhood’s cherry community. One year, maybe 20 years ago, the cherry trees began to wither. Ours too. We worried about it through several years of scant blossoms, sparse leaves, and cherries that were no more than pits. It had to go. All the others were already gone.
Its trunks were big and hard. Too heavy to slice and roll up the hill. They stayed for years as pedestals for 2’ pots of greenery, until time lightened them enough to be removed.
The tree’s a sweet memory now, disappeared and gone.
But the cedar sighed, free at last from cowering in the cherry’s shade. It exploded. It’s grown and grown and grown. It’s still going. It stands on our side of the sidewalk between our house and our neighbor’s, in the middle of the city, with no forest friends nearby. I’ve had it checked by two arborists. Is it safely rooted? Will it hold the slope? Yes and yes. They say it’s strong.
It shares its cedar scent and shades summer afternoons. It drops debris and tiny piney seeds on its loamy hillside and hides who-knows-how-many critter homes for chickadees that dart among its branches and blue jays and crows that strut and call. Raccoons climb it quietly in the dark, turning on the motion lights along the walk. Countless squirrels leap from the cedar to race across our deck.
Its pine-cone pellets and cast-off branches have built a forest floor beneath. It’s my grandson’s favorite garden spot. He digs and drives his yellow dump truck down the slope, spreading cedar debris across the steps and patio. Then he leaves the truck at the bottom, climbs back up, and drives himself down through the cedar’s prickly soil, thus practicing the art of garden immersion.
This is so beautifully written; I had tears in my eyes by the time I finished. On the one hand, it reminds me so much of The Giving Tree, and on the other hand, it stands as a beautiful metaphor for what this stage of my life (when I’m running out of runway) should be about.
Beautiful!
" Those were the years when all the photos we took included children." So evocative.