TREE DOWN!

My back door has a landing with steps going two different ways.  If I exit the door and turn right, I end up on my patio.  If I exit the door and turn left, I walk down two steps and fall into the oblivion of the backyard, a drop of about six feet.  The left turn is officially the Path to Nowhere, which also has a distinct advantage: If I cannot get to the backyard from my patio steps, no one can get to my patio steps from the backyard.

This is a win-win situation.

Directly outside of my back door is a seven-foot tall, dead tree trunk.  Before I moved here, when I lived in an apartment two houses over before the current owners took possession of this property, there were massive trees here.  One of the trees was so large that there was no room for a driveway and the roots encroached on the buildings (a main house out front and the converted carriage house out back).  That giant tree had to come down.  Several other trees came down, too, and one of them was the tree that left behind the seven-foot tall, dead trunk.

The trunk may seem like an eyesore, but I see it as eclectic in a naturalist, artsy kind of way.  Not only does it have decades of rotting personality, a team of boring (as in: making giant holes) bees nests inside of it every spring.  I actually have to yield my patio to them in April for a few weeks until they leave for the safety of the new leaves in the small grove behind the backyard.

I photograph that dead tree trunk when the autumn comes because ivy grows up it and turns wonderful colors.  I photograph that dead tree trunk when it snows because it happens to be in the sight line of a great natural scene with a bit of creep thrown in from the cemetery up the hill.  I photograph that dead tree trunk sometimes just because ... because it is rotting away with an interesting and expanding pattern.

Today, though, after living here for over a dozen years, I receive a text from my youngest, who has arrived home from work for his lunch hour of food and video games.  "Tree by the back door fell over.  What was left of it."  And, he attaches a picture.  Eventually he returns to work, and that's the last photo contact the tree and I have until I can make my way home to witness the horror for myself.

When I finally do get home, the first thing I notice is how naked the far end of my patio is.  Now, my stairs to nowhere really do go nowhere because there is nothing in my sight line anymore.  I walk to the edge of the concrete and peer down six feet.

There, sprawled on the ground with a fence post still jabbed into its side, is the tree trunk, resting like a dead soldier on the hard ground.  The freshly broken end has rolled away from my house, and part of the stone wall (along with the fence post) has rolled away with it.

Poor dead tree.  Poor old trunk.  Poor bees and termites and other creepy crawly things that called it home until its untimely demise sometime over the course of this morning.

Part of me is a little pleased that next April, if I am still living here, my patio will not be commandeered by those wood-boring bees.  Mostly, though, I am just sad for my decrepit, departed pal.

When the first snowfall comes, I will probably forget the tree is gone and head out for that same picture I have taken every snowfall for years and years, the one with the giant snowflakes reflecting in the back door light with the tree trunk in front and the distant trees behind.  The tree won't be there, though.

The chunks of rotted stem of its former trunk remain, constantly reminding me that my time here in this house, like the tree that once was, is probably coming to an end.