Love and Loss Among the Trees
By SUSAN BASKIN
As if these times weren’t tough enough, the tree in our backyard fell on the first day of the year. When I say the tree, I mean the tree, the only tree that grew out there. Over 100 years old, it had the stature of an elder statesman, commanding our attention and defining our backyard.
Shocked as I was, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew the tree was dying. About five years ago, my husband and I happened to look up at it and noticed a corner of the tree’s upper canopy was bare. We called the tree trimmer who called an arborist, who came over and examined the tree. The arborist told us the tree had fallen victim to a fungal disease common to Southern California. If we wanted, he would try to treat it. Absolutely, we said. This was our tree.
He couldn’t tell us when the tree would die, but looking up, at the highest leafless branches, he assumed it still had a few years. We could selectively trim the dead branches, but ultimately, the fungus would infect the rest of the tree causing it to die a slow, undramatic death. We followed his advice and trimmed the tree—and, in the way we all carry knowledge of the inevitability of death, we forgot about it.
We loved that tree. I loved that tree.
As with all the serious love relationships I’ve had in my life, I have been a serial monogamist when it comes to my love affairs with trees. From an early age, I sensed that love takes root, implanting its luster and scars into our soil.
My first romance was with a maple sapling. It was planted in front of the newly built house my parents bought when my family moved from an apartment in New York City to a suburb there.
I was six, pretty much a sapling myself, my limbs thin and lanky, all of me reaching moonily upwards, yearning to grow. Until we moved to that house and planted that tree, I had grown up surrounded by brick and concrete. The maple tree was the closest I’d come to nature. Narrow and scrawny as it was, it held all the secrets and enchantments of the forest.
I was something of an animist back then. The maple was my soulmate, but standing outside, alone, on the freshly laid sod and newly planted shrubbery, I would talk to all the plants. The red berries on the yew bushes, the pink rhododendron buds on the border shrubs. Those first green shoots of the maple elated me and prompted ebullient conversations.
“I have been a serial monogamist when it comes to my love affairs with trees.”
This communing with nature was private, or so I intended, until one day, in the midst of an animated discussion with a cluster of red berries on the yew bush, a boy’s voice intruded.
“Are you talking to that tree?” I looked up and saw the older brother of a girl I knew. “No!” I immediately said.
A mean boy, from a mean family, his braces gleamed from his sneer. “Yes, you were. I heard you. You’re nuts!”
Cackling, he ran back to his bike and sped away. In the collapsed time it takes for cruelty to spread, all the kids in the neighborhood knew I talked to trees.
I abandoned animism, but not the maple tree. I would read under it, still communicating, but with the barest of whispers. The maple grew, as I did. Our arms and trunks lengthening, both of us developed a shape, the tree’s branches arching gracefully, while I developed a bust, a waist and, as with the dense crown of leaves the tree had grown, my hair became thick and wavy, falling down against the now sturdy trunk as I rested my head under the summer shade.
When my mother sold the house after my father died, on her moving day, I bid good-bye to the maple. We’d both matured. I ran my hands along the maple’s solid trunk and stood under the canopy. So gloriously lush and broad, it reached across time and space to form an arbor over the road with the tree across the street. It had been many years since the maple and I had shared our lives, but as with all first loves, it still stirred feelings in me.
It was this maple that showed me that love can take many forms and, like the life of the tree itself, was complex and interwoven with my world and one greater. Like an extended family member, it invited me into the natural world and revealed that an unexpected source, even a gangly maple, can lead to an enchantment that could sustain and comfort, and enable me to dream.
I was living in LA by then and had loved other trees. An avocado, as regal as King Arthur’s Mighty Oak, its powerful limbs stretching out like the scales of justice. A towering Monterey Pine outside our second home, under which I’d hold my breath as I swung my infant son from a chair swing we’d hung on a lower branch, while my daughter nimbly climbed higher and higher until she reached branches looking too delicate to hold her, compact and lean as she was.
All of us loved that tree. It spoke of permanence – of its and ours belonging in that home. Like a beacon guiding us, as we turned the corner onto our street, my kids would crane their necks to see its sentinel rise soaring above the rooftops and welcome us home.
When we had to sell that house, leaving it and the tree, it ripped a hole in me, deep as a root system torn asunder. I kept the key to the front door on my key ring for too long. And in the way one avoids an old lover who has cast you off, I never drove past it, although we remained in the neighborhood. While walking one day, a faint acquaintance who knew we’d lived there, asked me if I’d seen the construction being done on the house. I shook my head and expressed no interest in it.
“They took down the tree,” she told me, anyway. “It’s not there anymore.”
The night our tree fell, I was upstairs in our bedroom and heard a preternatural sound. A sound of danger. I looked out into the darkness, bracing myself for the thundering upheaval of an earthquake, but none came. Fixed on the spot, I peered out into the secret night. Seeing nothing, suddenly, I thought of the tree. The tree! I raced downstairs and saw my husband carefully opening the sliding glass doors to the backyard.
“It’s the tree,” he said woefully, jolted by the crash.
Two massive limbs, containing enormous boughs, rested on a crushed chair that was beneath the tree. My husband had been sitting in that chair just that afternoon. Had it fallen during the day, he would have been killed. In these pandemic days, that seemed fitting.
“It had been many years since the maple and I had shared our lives, but as with all first loves, it still stirred feelings in me.”
“I told you it would fall one day,” my husband said, as we tentatively stepped outside, unsure if, like an earthquake aftershock, more of the tree would crash and fall. Indeed, he’d warned me that summer the tree might fall. That first Summer of Covid. The prior spring, my two brothers had skirted death from the virus. Shortly afterwards, the father of a close friend succumbed, like countless others.
Seeing the leaves on the tree having blossomed again, sensing their slight rustle right then, in the stark summer sun, I lulled myself into believing the new growth meant the tree would survive and outlast us. I’d had enough of disease and dying.
And in that time of isolation and solitude, of closings and timid, erratic openings, the backyard, the constancy of that tree, was our salvation. Over 50 feet tall, home to woodpeckers, squirrels, hummingbirds and finches, the tree graced the yard with its largesse, providing shelter from the sun and, in the whisper of its leaves, a rare tranquility.
It was a Siberian Elm, a name patently unsuitable for a Southern California resident, a non-native transplant, as I was. Like its namesake denizens, it was sturdy and could bear up against hardship. Over a century, it withstood droughts, storms, earthquakes, a species capable of adapting to catastrophe, a trait so many of us have had to discover.
In the days after the great boughs fell to the ground, we called our tree trimmer again, who came with the arborist. Can we trim it back? we asked. Lose the dead branches as we did before? We pointed to the still remaining limbs on which leaves were growing. There must be something, we implored, something we can do, so that the tree won’t be a danger. The arborist shook his head. The tree had to come down, he said. Our tree trimmer agreed. Was it finally the fungus? we asked. The arborist shrugged. “Trees are like people,” he said. “They die. “
A tree-cutting crew came later that month, at exactly 7:00 one morning. The sky was cloudless, a storybook blue. It had been cold that week, and as I slid the glass backdoors open to greet the crew, I felt the nip and chill of an LA winter morning.
In the weeks leading up to the crew’s arrival, my husband and I continued to sit in the yard. We were wary of the tree now. We’d moved the patio furniture to the side of the elm still blooming with leaves, avoiding the section where the limb had fallen. Occasionally, he or I would gaze cautiously up at the tree. Our trust in its steadfastness and safe shelter had been shaken.
I hadn’t slept well the night before and was awake and dressed when the tree crew arrived. As they filed into the backyard carrying their saws, I felt the mounting tension of awaiting an execution. As the work began, one of the workers buckled a harness around himself and attached a cable to the belt. His saw hanging by his side like a sword, he tossed a rope around an upper limb, and climbed up to a strong, neighboring branch where he wrapped and clipped the cable to secure himself. Legs astride, he steadied himself and began his sawing. A high-pitched drone filled the yard.
The highest branches came down first. Delicate and light, the twigs fell to the ground in a gentle, balletic motion.
Like a slow strip tease, the tree trimmer worked his way down from the leafy, top smaller branches. Gradually at first, then completely, the tree lost all its leaves. Without them, it looked exposed. Humiliated.
“When we had to sell that house, leaving it and the tree, it ripped a hole in me, deep as a root system torn asunder.”
As the limbs got thicker, the saws got longer. Sawdust spewed, forming a dense cloud as the trimmer sawed down to the larger limbs. A gash appeared on the trunk, a wound where each limb had been. Once sheered, the mighty limbs would swing wildly from the rope tied around them. Their motion slowing, they’d be lowered to the ground, where they’d land like the body of a fallen warrior. There the limb would be dragged like a corpse to a woodchipper parked in the alley. I thought of Hector, the Trojan hero, his great warrior’s body dragged by Achilles through the dusty streets of vanquished Troy. Above the back brick wall, I saw the dark stream of wood spewed out by the chipper.
Gash after gash, bough after bough, the trimmer continued the elm’s amputations. The sight brought back words from my childhood. “I’m going to tear you from limb to limb,” my mother would scream when at the end of her tether.
As a child, I didn’t think about the meaning. The words were just words, my mother said. Later, studying history in school, I learned that the arms and legs of medieval traitors would each be tied to a hind leg of four stationary horses which, when ordered, would gallop forward, pulling the traitor’s body apart, limb by limb. For the first time my mother’s words had meaning for me. I thought about them again that day watching the elm’s dismemberment, those echoes of the past, right then, fusing the tree with me.
When the work was done, a stump stared up like a tombstone. And in the days that followed, there was no shade or leaves to mitigate the blazing light that flooded the backyard and rooms of the house that faced it. An excruciating glare blinded my husband and me and, despite the winter, the rooms grew uncontrollably hot. Like a dybbuk rising from the grave, the tree, searching for a place to plant its roots, haunted us.
I am someone who yearns for permanence and can sense loss in the fleeting moment. I hold onto things. Keys. Trees. Homes. My children’s baby teeth. I have come to learn that, as many kinds of love exist, so it is with loss: a broken promise, a towering tree, a home housing a family’s unfolding life. Who can say what is too long to hold, or can separate the love from the loss?
In the epic poem, “Orlando Furioso,” a knight finds everything that was lost on Earth— prayers, remnants of fame, unfulfilled wishes—stored on the Moon. I imagine myself ambling up and down those shadowed lunar craters retrieving shards of innocence, houses, trees. I find the plague returned to history books, promise and reason as they were, before life’s injuries bore them away. Gathering them all, I return to Earth where somehow there is space for each and every thing that’s lost, and I restore them all.
I want to possess them, possess them here, on Earth. I’d be alive with experience and innocence and the wisdom of knowledge, where homes and trees rise again, where life, in all its punishing glory, is eternal. I come by this honestly.
“Love has its costs, I’ve learned. Trees die. Children grow. What we cherish most leaves us, oftentimes for good.”
“I hate death,” my mother announced the other day, this the same mother who screamed she would tear off my limbs. At 93, she doesn’t scream anymore, although she’s still prone to proclamations.
“I don’t understand the reason for death,” she declared. “It’s unnecessary.
I didn’t offer any worn truisms of relative worth. If we were not facing death, would we fully appreciate life? Without pain, happiness? I knew my mother’s answer.
Instead, I returned to the animism of my youth, the lustrous red of the yew bush berries, the sculpted outline of the maple leaf, a door, beckoning and open in welcome.
I will miss them.
And so the tree. We haven’t replanted it yet. It’s complicated. Costly. A matter of roots and brick and water. Long ago, this house and backyard were built and designed around this tree, when it was just branching upward in solitary majesty. Like us, those folks thought the elm would live forever.
Love has its costs, I’ve learned. Trees die. Children grow. What we cherish most leaves us, oftentimes for good. Eternity, it seems, is the exclusive province of loss, cruel and absolute as that may be.
Complications, it’s said, find solutions, but until ours do, the scorching heat and light of the tree’s dybbuk will continue to stalk us. But a day will come when we will plant a tree where that stump, the tombstone, now sits. Restive no more, the elm’s soul will return to the earth, its long, tentacled roots entwining themselves around the new tender ones, imparting an awareness of all it has ever known about air, soil, light and water, so that the young tree will flourish and grow.
And that tree will outlast us.
Susan Baskin has written for the LA Review of Books, Los Angeles Magazine and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. She has also written for film and television.