The hardest part

There was a crash outside. I initially thought it needed my attention and moved to get up, but I didn’t want to get up and told myself the dog had probably knocked something off the deck chasing a squirrel.

Later, when I did want to get up, I walked over to the farmyard and saw what had made the noise. The biggest limb off the only Sycamore in the farmyard had fallen. At its base, where it separated from the trunk, the limb was probably sixteen inches in diameter. I had mowed where it now rests four hours earlier.

When the tree was a sapling my grandfather, of German descent who liked things nice and tidy, told Mr. Dunning, whom we had purchased the place from and who still came down to take care of things because we were out of our league, to remove the tree. It was next to a newly poured concrete slab that my grandfather didn’t want to crack. Mr. Dunning, a practical sort, said, “Marvin, that is going to be the most important tree you have here.”

Indeed, Mr. Dunning had foresight, as the fast-growing Sycamore soon provided shade for the farmyard in summer afternoons. On a hot day you could plan your mowing schedule around its shadow, saving that section for the relative coolness of shade.

My father once told me that he had climbed up in the Sycamore one weekend, and got about forty feet off the ground when someone came down the lane to knock on his door. He stayed hidden in the tree rather than climb down and have them know he had been playing, which is a detail that might be a little too funny to be true, but I’ll never know for sure now.

It stands by itself. Out of the thousands of trees here it and the Pecan in the lower pasture have the greatest distance from other trees. And it is perhaps the tallest tree here, except for some Pines back in Pine Canyon across the creek and way back in the woods.

I’ve been concerned about it this year. The limb that fell didn’t leaf out at all, and the rest of the tree didn’t have the abundance of leaves it has had in the past. That the limb fell confirms what I’ve been thinking.

Today I fired up my chainsaw and set about cleaning up the debris. I bucked the limb, split the logs, and piled those and most of the smaller branches on the trailer behind the little tractor, to distribute between woodpile and burn pile. Sycamore burns hot and fast in the wood stove, and I use it to get the fire going in the mornings or when the room needs a burst of heat.

When people want to help with such a task but don’t want to operate the saw, I offhandedly suggest that they gather and carry limbs, taking a little perverse satisfaction in having sold them on the hardest part of the job. I’m letting the Husqvarna and gravity do my work. Moving everything is what is so tiring.

But today, working on the Sycamore that I fear may be at the end of its life, I understood that there is something harder still, which is the realization that I remember when the tree wasn’t there, that I am older than it is, and that someday it won’t be there again.