midwinter elegy

 

Today I woke up to realize that sometime in the past couple of days, the tree that has been in the courtyard between my building and the row of low townhouses next door (where they have remodeling the unit that once belonged to the Polish couple since fall) has gone missing. Strange for a kind of big tree, and stranger still I had to think for a minute why the area outside my windows looked different. Granted, its been bare for months, much less noticeable in winter months, but still there. The small sapling that occupied the front garden of the townhomes, once barely to the second floor twenty years ago, but until this week, cresting the 4th floor and moving onto the 5th. It wasn't wide, but I occasionally suspected that in a year or two, in full leafiness, it would be close enough to lean out the window and touch it. It was a constant, always losing its leaves in like one day in the fall, and taking until well into May to even begin to bud. I didn't pay it much mind in winter when you had a clear view across the courtyard, but in summer, it offered a little privacy between buildings. 

Yesterday, we slept til noon, and could hear some saw buzzing and construction down below in and out of sleep. I looked out there at one point later from the dining room and noticed they'd moved the fence forward closer to the stoop, but was distracted enough by my full day of writing to not even notice if the tree was missing during the daytime. Now that I think of it, it probably was. At some point yesterday, with my back to the window, it felt like the late afternoon light was different in the apartment, but I wrote it off to lengthening days. Only this morning as I rolled over did I notice I could see the rooftop unimpeded in the view from the bedroom and sat up with a start. 

I'm guessing the sawing yesterday may have been the removal, which probably was felled backward toward the alley mostly, quickly and quietly without a lot of fanfare. It felt like a bad omen, a loss, so much that I teared up and had to chide myself for crying over a tree I apparently didn't even realize was immediately gone. I feel like something I loved, that belonged to me, as much as anything in nature belongs to us, was stolen. I am probably being dramatic and superstitious, and this was certainly an act of man, not nature, but I can't help thinking that two large trees, decades old,  fell in the yard of my childhood home in the months before I lost each parent, both huge towering trees diseased and off-balance and taken out by storms and rot. It made me uneasy and anxious today, more than usual. Yesterday was also weirdly stormy for February. 

A couple months back, they had planted two small evergreen bushes toward the front of the steps, so I suppose these will have to be my trees now...