Mourning

Most mornings, we walk the same path through the park: from the northwest corner, down the diagonal path to the southeast corner, across the southern edge, then diagonally back up to the northeast corner. On our first pass, I noted tire scars in the soft earth cutting across the southern lawn. The first signal that something was amiss. Coming back to the northeast, my gaze stuck on an incongruous black lump. Watching as I neared, it eventually resolved into a pair of men's mittens, resting on a tree stump.

It was only then that the tree stump itself registered, and I was finally struck by the hole in the sky where a large sugar maple had been the day before. It was enough to stop me in my tracks, as I mourned the loss of a companion and wondered at how, even after settling on the mittens on the stump, my gaze had slid over such a dramatic change in a landscape so familiar for so long.

The maple had been a tree with a distinctive character, and I had, in a part of my mind, known for some time that it was marked for the park maintenance chainsaws. Its trunk featured a significant bend, from a foot or so off the ground for a length of nine or ten feet, before straightening up again to hold the crown vertically. Light snowfalls would collect on the angled part of the trunk. It was oriented in such a way that it leaned directly away from the southwest-northeast path, creating the illusion that it was just as straight as any other tree, but had some strange magnetic attraction for the snow.

In the hole left by the maple's absence, a young pin cherry is now in plainer view. The cherry was blown down in a strong wind storm last summer. It lay canted, roots clawing at the air, for a week or two. Apparently having proven itself worthy of a second chance, park maintenance righted it and tethered it with stakes so it could reestablish itself. It still leans a bit, a small echo of its missing neighbor.

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