Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?
-Joni Mitchell
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Flowering crabapple, Loveland Colorado: After the October storm
I have a fruit tree. She was beautiful.
Like every other house on my block, my house has one tree smack in the center of the front yard (at least each tree is a different variety). Mine is a flowering crabapple, and she is the center of my land, my small domain. A bedecked, bee-dazzling beauty in spring. A shady screen from the sun in summer. In fall, a source of food and shelter for the winged and the bushy-tailed.
Oh, she was gorgeous this year. In bloom, she was deep, deep fuchsia-red. She was buxom and bountiful and generous and female to the core.
She was overgrown.
I knew it before the storm. I’d gotten the tree people called. They came out two weeks ago and assessed her and estimated the job at $285 (I winced). But they didn’t want to come and do the pruning until late November or December, when the tree would be truly dormant. The weekend before the freeze, I thought I might pru ne some pruning of the smaller branches, the ones I could reach, but I pulled tomato plants and cut broccoli raab and obsessed about roses instead. Because that’s how I thought of last weekend’s coming storm: a freeze. Then perhaps a really deep freeze. I scoffed at the predicted possible accumulation. “Snowpocalypse Nah,” I tweeted. I stayed down in Denver to avoid commuting during the coming storm. But I didn’t think of it as a tree killer. I worried, but mostly about my roses, and about whether the soil would go into permafreeze with my $75 worth of bulbs from High Country still on order, and whether my co-workers would help me use up the huge bag of broccoli raab.
I am home now, three days post-snow, to find that weather has pruned my tree for me.
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High up, a broken branch twisted by the snow's weight
I unload the car in the dark. Passing cars actually slow down to view the damage. I imagine they are paying some kind of respects. My neighbors have seen the blood and sweat I’ve lavished on my modest little plot, and have seen how slowly I’ve had to do it.
In a few hours it will be light. The damage may look better or it may look worse. The sprinkler people will come to do their belated blowout. My neighbor will come with a chain saw. Another friend who knows from trees might come. He might tell me that she will live, that she’ll be beautiful and abundant again. But right now at 5 a.m. on a dark Saturday morning, I think that only the poets can comfort me, and I paw through my shelves of books, each shelf a section of the lives I’ve lived, to find Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, who writes luminous poems about nature and its secrets, its wounds and its metaphors, in poems like “Blackwater Woods,” in American Primitive (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1976).
“…To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”
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