A decade or so ago, my building contractor and I walked my wooded lot in Oak Bluffs, sentencing trees to death. It was a sad affair, watching him tie ribbons ’round one old oak tree after another, rudely mocking their fate with festoonery. My point in buying the lot in the first place was to cozy under the arms of its oaks, maples, beeches, junipers, renegade sassafras, and what have you. Nevertheless, my main point in buying the lot was to build a house. Something had to give.
Here and there, the contractor pointed and asked, “What about this tree?”
“Does it have to go?” I pleaded.
“Not really.”
“Then save it.” I fled to America before the first buzz of the saw.
Some forty years earlier, in a New York suburb, my childhood home had sprung up in the midst of a woodland community of squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, the occasional rabbit and deer, and a tuneful orchestra of crickets, tree frogs, and birds. A few years later, a developer came along and cleared most of the woods behind us. I cried. But by the time I was a teenager, trees seemed more like “the sticks,” and I yearned instead for forests of skyscrapers inhabited by critters of the two-legged sort. And that’s where I happily ended up for most of my young adult life.
By age forty, while I hadn’t quite “had it” with city living, I’d come to appreciate respites in the glory of the woods again. The win-win notion of a sustainable environment resonated with me too. Which is why I would eventually choose to share my lot in the Bluffs with my new best friends: my trees.
The first spring after the house went up on “our” lot, the buds of the trees – first the maples, then the oaks – gingerly unfurled and painted a pale green
shimmer against the sky. Squirrels lustfully chased each other around the trunks and performed acrobatic stunts on high. An ever-changing avian chorus of Islanders and “flyashores” serenaded me free of charge. Summer emerged, and towering green canopies dappled the sunlight on the lawn, shaded me from the heat, and whispered sweet nothings in the breeze.
The leaves of October preened in auburn and gold. Gradually, they wafted to the ground – first the maples, then the oaks – and on sunny, apple-eating days, I gently raked them into fluffy piles. Above me emerged a pale winter sky silhouetted by dark, graceful branches, secret birds’ nests, and a few stubborn oak leaves. In my mid-winter absence, they would all glisten like crystal in their icy overcoats.
End of the honeymoon.
The following spring, I returned to realize the roof gutters were overflowing with dead brown leaves and branches. They’d been thoughtlessly dumped by…trees. This was a trifle, compared to finding two poor, dead squirrels and a riot of feces, dead flies, shredded draperies, and chewed window frames in the family room. This can happen when a chimney flue is accidentally left open, and it happens to sit right under the big limb of a…tree.
A bird couple began courting every day in song – loudly, before 5 a.m. – between one tree and another tree, waking my evil twin, who wished for a shotgun and perfect aim. She transferred her wrath to the Oriental bittersweet vines, which refused to give up their choke hold on the trees without an all-season fight. Seeds from the maples filled the newly cleaned gutters, sponged up the rainwater, and clogged the downspouts. And most of the “shade-tolerant”
perennials of the previous year had vanished. My brown thumb may have had something to do with it, but I’m laying blame on the trees.
In June, when T-shirt weather arrived in my neighbor’s sun-filled yard, it was still sweatshirt weather in mine. And as I kicked back in mid-summer and gazed up at the lush green leaves, I had but one thought: In a few months, I’m gonna have to rake all these suckers. Time and again. And get rid of them somewhere. And get the gutters cleaned…
Several spring seasons would pass before the advent of the next new thing: the plague of the winter moth. In springtime, in between munching my canopy into lace, the happy caterpillars would rain down on me, as would their “peppercorns.” Picnics were out of the question. Yard work would end with a strip down to my underwear in the all outdoors. And despite my assiduous lifting and flicking, maybe a half hour later, back in the house, a telltale creepy-crawly feeling would advance down my neck.
I fought back by wrapping the oaks and maples with duct tape and smearing it with sticky stuff from the garden store, which ruined my work clothes. Yet it worked like caterpillar kryptonite, thwarting the advance of the critters up the tree trunks. They retaliated by eating the understory trees, the herb garden, and some of the surviving perennials.
The storm gods had yet to hurl a tree limb through my roof. But since it could have happened, I summoned the tree man again last year. We walked the lot, sentencing ominous branches to death. Here and there, he pointed and said: “We could take out this whole tree.”
I shuddered.
Not a chance.
I love my trees.