Trees are our quiet celebrities

We recently had a big storm that took down a number of large trees.  We lost a tree even though it wasn’t our tree. It belonged to our next door neighbor,  but we thought of it as ours because it shaded our house and our backyard. It was really two oaks that were lost, the other one fell on her house. 

Another massive oak came down a few blocks over, it smashed several cars. I kept finding reasons to walk by and see it, (it took days for the trees to be removed because there were so many down.) I wasn’t the only one. It was common conversation to talk about how much that tree was loved. People snapped pictures; dogs eagerly sniffed the fallen debris; a father placed his kids up on the trunk to say goodbye.

The owner of yet another giant oak posted on the neighborhood listserv thanking the many people who stopped by to pay respects to his fallen tree.  

The thing about losing a tree is that you don’t know how much you love it until it’s gone.  It was painful to watch “our” oak hacked to pieces and lifted by crane and trucked away. It had lived longer than any of us.

We love our trees, they are our quiet celebrities. We mourn them and say nice things about them when they’re gone, but we don’t tell them we love them often enough when they’re alive.

The dangerously leaning tree comes down.

This is the view of the tree I saw everyday through the upstairs window.