Enlightened

The lush, leafy umbrella of our enormous tree is gone and suddenly our formerly dark except-in the-winter family room fills with a lovely light. It’s a northern exposure, so it’s not blinding, but with  two skylights, one window, and eight feet of patio doors the world just got much brighter. What is not so bright is the reason we came to bask in this light at this particular moment. We had had two removal quotes previously in the $1600 range neither of which  included disposal of the wood. Each time we hemmed and hawed, but ended up not doing it. Then last week the owner of a tree company who was doing a small job in our neighborhood knocked on the door and inquired if we would like the tree taken out. He was desperate for work, he said, and would remove it, cut up the wood, haul it to the store for the fireplace, and prune the trees in the front yard, all for $1100. The only thing was he’d lost a lot of his equipment due to the economic downturn and no longer had a saw with a circumference great enough to wrestle the giant all the way to the ground, which meant there would still be about four feet of trunk left standing. I wasn’t there when he said this, but Eric told me his humiliation was acute and complete.

It was. I saw it this morning in the stark outline of what remains of the tree.

What’s left is unsightly of course, but we will deal with that. My husband will dust off his forestry degree and hack away at it. He already has a plan to split it in two and take it out in parts. So aesthetics are not the issue. The issue is the four men who worked from nine a.m. to seven p.m, two of whom then came back the next day and worked another four or five hours loading up the many logs and dragging them down Rte 42 the ten miles to the store. Including the owner, all have been reduced to piecework – a day here, a day there. The youngest, the father of a newborn, had to move in with his in-laws because the cost of keeping an apartment had proven unsustainable. The oldest, a man in his 50’s, has a bad back, but in spite of his boss’s admonitions to be careful, cleared away a mountain of limbs by himself

As we stood in the backyard Wednesday night ankle-deep in tree debris Eric said, “Those guys -- they’re the faces of the recession, you know.”

I  know.

I thought of them  this morning as I stood at the back door in the early gray light with my coffee looking out at the butchered corpse of our once vital tree. Its shape, even minus arms, brought to mind a trip to Arizona and the outline of a lone saguaro cactus standing sentinel on the mesa. The silhouette of both the tree and the cactus is defined by abrupt lines, too much space, and a harsh scarceness of symmetry. Of course the dead tree lacks the saguaro’s needle-like spines, or seems to at least.  But it isn't true. Appearances to the contrary,  the tree is fairly abloom with spines.

Just ask the four men who rubbed up against it this week.