With apologies to Mr. Kilmer

My tree is missing.

It was there when I left, gone when I returned. In the space of a couple hours. Not long for a tree to vanish.

Well, not entirely vanished. There’s still the stump. Mute evidence that at that place a tree once stood. But what once stood at least 40 feet tall is reduced to four inches flat. A lotta tree gone in a very short time – almost like Paul Bunyan reached down and plucked it like a posey. It was an odd thing to come home to.

So I did a bit of checking. It was a city tree crew, not a gigantic plaid-clad lumberman that did that bit of urban logging. Technically – and legally – it wasn’t my tree at all. Growing there between the sidewalk and curb, it was the city’s tree and the city was free to do with it as it chose. And the city chose to cut it down.

Now I don’t want to go all Joyce Kilmer over this. Truth be told, as trees go, this was no giant sequoia worthy of admiring preservation. No, it was one of those rather rangy trees that just sort of grow unbidden, ridden with dying branches, casting no shade of note and intermittently strewing annoying seed pods and other effluvia across the neighborhood. And, of doubtless civic interest, was heaving the curb, damaging the gutter and generally imperiling the freshly resurfaced street. It was a tree whose time had come … and, apparently, gone.

Still, ever since we moved in here better than 30 years ago, every time I’ve looked out the kids’ bedroom windows that tree was there. Now it’s not.

Yeah, I know. Time doesn’t stand still and trees don’t last forever … nothing does. For that matter, other than being rid those seasonal seed drifts and the constant threat of a clogging clump of tree roots invading my sewer pipe, my life will go on pretty much as it will, boulevard tree or no boulevard tree.

Still…

Change, particularly abrupt change, is disconcerting. It throws us momentarily out of step, out of kilter, out of sorts. Causes us to wonder, “What next?” Then leaves us to figure out what to do about it.

Well, there ain’t enough super glue in Menard’s to reassemble that missing tree...

Around that stump there is fringe of suckers growing … tree clones that, if favored by sun, rain and who- or whatever passes by, will in time grow up and leaf out into reasonable facsimiles of their progenitor. But with the tallest towering in at eight and a half inches, it will take more miracle than MiracleGro for that almost-a-sapling to give me an afternoon’s shade while I still tread the green side of the sod.

Of course I could haul in a tree dug up from someplace else – at some expense and inconvenience and with no assurance of success.

There;s no quick fix for a missing tree.

Just like there’s not a quick fix for a lot of things that ain’t like they used to be; no way to turn what was back into what is and keep it that way.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing – if you don’t think so, sitting through a couple of Jurassic Park sequels might give you the idea.

Now a tree is no T. Rex, but what’s done is done. So I’ll just wait for the municipal eager beavers to come around to chew that stump away to nothing. I’ll have one less thing to mow around, and come the next windstorm, be glad I don’t have to concern myself with that dying old tree rearranging the rafters in my house.

And meantime, I’ll just bear in mind that: “Words are writ by fools like me, but only the City can steal a tree.”