Too much light is coming in my upstairs window this afternoon. It’s pouring through an empty space in the sky where two trees used to be.
It took a crew of men a single morning to take down two maple trees in front of our house, trees which had spent a hundred years growing taller than the rooftops. Now, ragged chunks lie everywhere in the grass, oozing sap and a wild sour smell.
“We were just going to trim out the dead stuff,” one of the work crew said, “but when we got up there, it looked pretty bad.”
It looked pretty good from our window, I think. My husband and I sat in the kitchen, talking over the noise of the chain saw. “Are you remembering the black ash?” I asked and he nodded.
Years ago, we had watched a Native American man preparing a black ash tree for making baskets. “We explain to the tree why we need to cut it down,” he told us, “and then we bury it in the ground for three days to give the spirit time to leave.”
My husband stands at the upstairs window. “It sure looks different now,” he says.
It sure does.