The Silver Maple

The silver maple out back, in the neighbors' yard, is coming down. Its limbs hollowed out by water and squirrels, it's too weak to stand, and a strong storm's hand on its filigreed leaves may be too much. The tree is benevolent and welcoming on this mild summer day. A hurricane or its remnants could put us, snug in our wood frame houses, at serious risk.

No tree falling in the forest, this, but a noisy, mechanized affair, as men scale up and rappel down from its leafy crown, taking apart piece by piece over seventy years of nature's quiet, steady work. This tree was a sapling when neighbor Frank—patron of the block--was born. He grew up with that tree. To grow up: humans doing as trees do. The tree's life is ending, his is continuing, into his own late autumn, in the new sun on the house's light green siding this afternoon.

This tree defines our yards: the way the Caseys' deck curves around it, the shade it has provided, filtered sun flicking even now on my page, a harp for the breeze in this quiet afternoon, a rustle, a soft sound like the feel of grass, ambient, a sound placing you in a comfortable, safe spot. Shade plants have done well in our yards, but that will change.

“If you take the time, you can count the rings,” Frank says to someone, inside, while holding a substantial log. “That's the rot, starting.” Inside, unseen. Isn't that like most things—cancer, clots, a hardening of the heart, a desiccated spirit, cut off by some small cellular-level insurrection?

How can I not think about birth, life, death, the inevitable transformation of our very matter into energy, into something else? It's all here, in a tree's scale and calendar.

I ask the tree man if they'll put aside some logs for me, for my first fall and winter with a fireplace. He offers to cut it to fit. I go inside and quickly measure the opening in my fireplace, and return with the number, twenty-four inches. Frank's wife hovers in her doorway, hearing this exchange. I worry that my inquiry seems disrespectful, but firewood surely is a better outcome than being fed into a chipper and flung into the back of a truck. I'll remember the silver maple on a cold, dark day, maybe near the solstice, when a spark catches and a fire blazes, throwing light and heat into the living room. We should all hope for such alchemy, us, humans, born of stars, energy and matter, and back again, in cycles we will always remain ignorant of, clocks moving at different tempos.

The smoke will rise, the scent of home and hearth, the fire will burn, the ashes will be heaped behind the garage, maybe mixed back into the yard's soil, for whatever grows from this ground in the future. Another neighbor and I talk about where to place our Japanese maple saplings, young trees with spindly, bendy trunks and awkward branches. They will be somebody's shade, someday.