Exploring the inner tree hugger
Yesterday, part of the crown of a horse chestnut tree which stands between our house and our closest neighbours cracked and fell, taking out our neighbours' power and telephone wires and mostly being stopped on it's way to the ground by another branch - which lasted a few hours and then gave up under the strain. As with several of our trees, this was considered to add to the character of the neighbournood, and had a tree preservation order on it.
The tree surgeon, and then the council's tree preservation officers, have agreed that the result is to make the whole tree dangerous - after all, it had lost all the substance from one side, was seriously lopsided and leaning towards the house, and was all of 20 feet from the house wall and towering over the place. I had to agree.
And yet, as I sit here listening to them taking down the remnants of the trunk, all the main branches having already gone, I'm feeling a sense of huge loss and a substantial amount of guilt.
I've known this tree since I was about 7 - it was then in the garden of a friend; when his parents moved away about three years later, mine bought the house; then Nel and myself bought it from my parents about 10 years ago. It was a prolific provider of conkers - and through the latter part of my childhood gave me a currency (in season) to spread around my schoolmates - something very useful for a weedy, bookish child. Mind you, it was also an ongoing bane of my mother's existence, dropping leaves most of the time, sticky bits in one season and vast quantities of hard missiles in others - and as it overshadowed our back (kitchen) door, it was very difficult to ignore. Kids used to come and beg the conkers, and mum wasn't too happy about that either. It got away with being a bane of mother's existence, which I never did myself....
A small wind in Autumn, and you wanted to wear a hard hat when braving that entrance; all through the spring, you came in and left a trail of sticky over the kitchen floor and into the house. It assisted hugely in flooding the yard and the drive with drifts of dead leaves. It wasn't a tree which you could ignore, love it or loathe it.
I climbed it quite a bit, though it wasn't the best climbing tree in the garden (we had to fell that one a few years ago), and came to know the peculiarities of it's branch structure pretty well. It overshadowed the window of the room I had as my study in my teens, and would tap on the window in familiar fashion when the breeze got up.
When Nel and myself moved in, we blocked up the kitchen door. There were other reasons, but one reason was to avoid the barrage being quite so immediate on opening the door. My son had the room which used to be my study, and I lopped the branch which tapped on the window, as it kept him awake at night. It stopped being quite so prominent, but it was still there, and every so often excited memories of childhood.
Now it's all but gone, and I've given the order - OK, jointly, and with good reason, but I'm still implicated in it's death, or so my emotions tell me. It feels about as bad as putting one of our dogs to sleep does. This all flies completely against reason - but reason doesn't govern how I feel (I'm sure it used to, and the rational me thinks it still should).
There again, maybe it's resonating with larger things - the wrench of the past (my self of the past, who I am, what I represent, what I'm FOR) being demolished bit by bit as has been happening for at least the last seven years, possibly the last thirteen, cut off, like the tree, in multiple bits, spread over time. The imminent prospect that the house will have to go as well. An arid wasteland where once there was a life...
A clash of symbols, ringing in my ears and sounding like chainsaws.
The tree surgeon, and then the council's tree preservation officers, have agreed that the result is to make the whole tree dangerous - after all, it had lost all the substance from one side, was seriously lopsided and leaning towards the house, and was all of 20 feet from the house wall and towering over the place. I had to agree.
And yet, as I sit here listening to them taking down the remnants of the trunk, all the main branches having already gone, I'm feeling a sense of huge loss and a substantial amount of guilt.
I've known this tree since I was about 7 - it was then in the garden of a friend; when his parents moved away about three years later, mine bought the house; then Nel and myself bought it from my parents about 10 years ago. It was a prolific provider of conkers - and through the latter part of my childhood gave me a currency (in season) to spread around my schoolmates - something very useful for a weedy, bookish child. Mind you, it was also an ongoing bane of my mother's existence, dropping leaves most of the time, sticky bits in one season and vast quantities of hard missiles in others - and as it overshadowed our back (kitchen) door, it was very difficult to ignore. Kids used to come and beg the conkers, and mum wasn't too happy about that either. It got away with being a bane of mother's existence, which I never did myself....
A small wind in Autumn, and you wanted to wear a hard hat when braving that entrance; all through the spring, you came in and left a trail of sticky over the kitchen floor and into the house. It assisted hugely in flooding the yard and the drive with drifts of dead leaves. It wasn't a tree which you could ignore, love it or loathe it.
I climbed it quite a bit, though it wasn't the best climbing tree in the garden (we had to fell that one a few years ago), and came to know the peculiarities of it's branch structure pretty well. It overshadowed the window of the room I had as my study in my teens, and would tap on the window in familiar fashion when the breeze got up.
When Nel and myself moved in, we blocked up the kitchen door. There were other reasons, but one reason was to avoid the barrage being quite so immediate on opening the door. My son had the room which used to be my study, and I lopped the branch which tapped on the window, as it kept him awake at night. It stopped being quite so prominent, but it was still there, and every so often excited memories of childhood.
Now it's all but gone, and I've given the order - OK, jointly, and with good reason, but I'm still implicated in it's death, or so my emotions tell me. It feels about as bad as putting one of our dogs to sleep does. This all flies completely against reason - but reason doesn't govern how I feel (I'm sure it used to, and the rational me thinks it still should).
There again, maybe it's resonating with larger things - the wrench of the past (my self of the past, who I am, what I represent, what I'm FOR) being demolished bit by bit as has been happening for at least the last seven years, possibly the last thirteen, cut off, like the tree, in multiple bits, spread over time. The imminent prospect that the house will have to go as well. An arid wasteland where once there was a life...
A clash of symbols, ringing in my ears and sounding like chainsaws.