When we first entered this house, ten-plus years ago, I walked straight to the open, angled expanse of the front room windows and looked out at the bare branches of the large maple that rose before me, and said, “This place could work. It would be almost like living in a tree house.” We moved in, and set two chairs at the window for the best view–chairs embroidered with a pattern aptly called “tree of life.”

This chair, and that chair, too soon became among my favorite perches. From one of the other of them, I watched seasons and climates change, and my children. My marriage, friendships, and political climates. My faith and choices. My tastes and preferences. The plot of novels, the arc of poetry. The scope of technology, outside myself, and inside myself too—this last sometimes somewhat insidiously. I watched the flow of traffic, the flow of pedestrians, the flow of things. From one or the other of these chairs, I watched the tree–leaves unfurling, flourishing, fading, and falling, stirred by wind, or as still as stopped time. Winged seeds helicoptering to the ground, all in a whirl. Shadows of trunk and limbs stretching toward me in a kind of embrace, and tracing themselves upon the front room walls. The light stippling through them. The light and shade.

Last year, we couldn’t help but notice the bareness of the tree. So few leaves, it looked stark naked come summer, a skeleton of its former self. Trees have been coming down all around us lately; the ratcheting buzz of chainsaws persistently invasive, in the more temperate of our Chicagoland months. There’s been a great Ash blight, I’ve been told. But there were so many other trees, too, that had reached the end of their suburban life expectancy. We were afraid our maple was failing. (Almost sure, though we tried not to dwell on that.) One more year, we’d give it. And maybe another, if there was any sign of green. Maybe three.
But this year, with all the other trees on our street and in our neighborhood (and, yes, the world beyond) turned varying degrees of lush and green, there was our maple tree, exposed, down to the last twig.
As the days passed, I felt, along with sadness, a growing sense of shame. One can only look at a dead thing for so long. Too long, I felt, and it begins to seem careless and cruel, vaguely voyeuristic, as when one lingers at the sight of a terrible accident. Rest in peace, I wanted to say to the tree. You’ve done such a good, beautiful job, being who you are. But the tree was already dead. Instead of remembering it like this, I wanted to remember our maple as it was. The house it made for me and my family, because of its very existence.


We hired some men, and the men came, and they dismembered the tree, working from the outermost pieces of itself, inward, and from the top, down, and we watched and we listened and we saw and we heard, and it was over in two days, by the time the stump was ground up and removed, and it was terrible, how quickly a creature that took decades upon decades to grow, can come down and disappear, as if it never existed at all.
But it did. It did. And we loved it—its shape and shade and anchoring presence—and I imagine the multiple people who lived here before us did too.
We kept some dry limbs to burn, and when we burn them we will remember the tree. And we kept a great piece of wood that my husband, Greg, hopes to use as part of collaborative art piece this summer. 



We kept, and we will keep, our photographs of the tree, and its memory. And I will look for it every time I sit down in one of those chairs by the front room window. I will look for it from the kitchen window, too. And when I walk down the street, or up it, or turn down the street, or up it, or pull out of the driveway, or pull into the driveway. Or see light against the front room wall, stark light with fewer shadows, and no trunk and limbs and branches and leaves and winged seeds, cast up against the walls of the front room anymore. Only reflected against the limits of my mind and imagination.

Dich wundert nicht des Sturmes Wucht
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered
leaves.Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thingripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered
leaves.Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thingripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Anita Barrows)