These musings were recorded during our years
in the Atlanta, GA, area.

  Letting Go of Good to Find Best

October 2, 2003. The sounds of a buzz saw and wood chipper droned all day
long, accompanied by sudden warning cries from Mike, the tree cutter,
from about 20 or more feet up and attached (too loosely if you ask me)
to various trees around the yard. I watched in amazement as he cut
branch after branch, felling them with precision into one stack below
each tree.
 
What had been three trees and numerous branches from massive oaks is now
mulch, left to nurture our flowerbeds. Tree trunks and branches a foot
and more in diameter were sucked into the jaws of the chipper, which
then spewed them out in small pieces-enough to fill a wheelbarrow over
150 times, as the chips were distributed around the yard.
 
The decision to cut down the trees was not easily made. Moving to the
forests of Georgia from the plains of north Texas eight years ago was
like entering paradise for this tree-hugger. Therefore, cutting down
anything green is practically a sin in my mind. But there is green and
there is green. The green trees are wondrous to behold. The green mildew
growing on the deck, porch, and patio, is not. I could almost hear the
house sigh as the overhanging limbs were cut away. "Ahhh, sunlight,
fresh air. I can breathe again." (O.K., so you didn't hear the house say
that. Do you speak "house"?)

The tree of most concern was a white pine standing sentinel outside my
kitchen window. Standing sentinel like a drunken soldier, that is.
Looking at it from the street the tree was beautiful-nicely shaped,
about 50 feet high, with rich green needles. But from the side. Ahh,
from the side. From that angle you could see that there were no limbs on
the back side at all and the tree was listing forward at about a 20
degree angle. Since the tree grew at the very edge of the cliff we call
our backyard, there could not have been any roots holding it securely on
that back side.

Trees fall. A fact I didn't know until we moved to Atlanta. What did I
know about trees, coming from Plano, Texas? But after seeing news report
after news report about trees that had taken a plunge, smashing cars,
houses, and sometimes, people, we decided it was time for the white pine
to come down at our bidding and in the direction we would choose, rather
than letting nature send it crashing either into our back deck or worse,
into our neighbor's house.

I spent most of the day going from window to window checking the
progress, fearing for the lives of those involved with power saw and
chipper, and hoping we had made the right decisions. There was no
difficulty in deciding to cut the large branches overhanging the house,
but the trees, especially the pine which greeted me at my kitchen window
each morning-that was another thing. Maybe we had been too hasty. Maybe
it wasn't going to fall. Maybe it would have stood for another ten
years. Who am I to make the decision to cut down this living thing?

And then it was gone.

It had been difficult to make the decision to let go of the pine, but in
its place was a new vista. There were so many other trees behind the
pine that had not been visible before from my kitchen window. The
expansiveness of the newly opened space made the area seem so much
larger. The deep azure autumn sky spread a canopy as rich as the green
had ever been. I could see so much farther now, and as if in reward,
golden leaves from distant tulip poplars twirled and danced their way to
the ground.

And one more thing. I couldn't see in the standing pine what I now view
clearly in the remaining stump. This tree was rotten at its core. It
looked great on the outside, at least from the front where green limbs
stretched toward the sun, but it was not healthy on the inside, where it
really mattered.

Ouch! Another lesson to be learned by this stubborn heart.

©2003 Anita Lee