Sap, Cracks, and a Man With a Rake

Our gardener (yes, we have a gardener because our mother planted a garden so large and unwieldy that no one could possibly put the time or effort into maintaining it like she did), our gardener has as her assistant her boyfriend, who is pretty useless. He stands around while she’s on her knees pulling weeds, and drinks coffee and talks to her back. Sometimes he leans on a rake to make it look like he’s working, but he’s actually not. I know. I watch him out the window. I don’t know what she sees in him because she’s brilliant.

Anyway, Boyfriend fancies himself something of an arborist, as if he earned the degree by osmosis, standing next to the woman who actually has one. Last time they were here, he beckoned Suze outside to inform her that the mature red maple outside my bedroom window is dying and needs to be cut down. He pointed to the sap running down its trunk and the cracks in the limbs beneath the canopy. He was insistent and urgent that the tree needs to be cut down before a disaster happens.

My dad was a tree planter like the old man in Zorba the Greek. He planted trees as gifts to the generations that would follow. The first tree I recall him fussing over was the crabapple on the front lawn of our house on Lauralynn Crescent. It was a beautiful little tree that bloomed a glorious shade of pink, bubblegum with soul, for a precious couple of days, maybe a week, in the spring of my young life.

At the cottage, by the lake, Dad planted a row of birches down the edge of a vacant lot. I remember him planting them. I remember him spraying the caterpillar nests that plagued them every few years. He was not the kind of guy who hired somebody to take care of the trees. He did it himself. I don’t know where he got the trees from. He must have bought them at a nursery, but he put them in himself, and they would still be there today if someone hadn’t cut them down in a rage.

Dad also planted a group of five maple trees beside the cottage. He dug up those saplings from the woods next to our cousins’ golf course, with their permission, of course. I remember the day he put them in, those bony little trees with trunks no bigger than my arm. Now, half a century later, those maples are crazy and cracked, troublesome, dropping their brittle branches on unsuspecting car hoods and passersby. They creak and moan, they cast a shade so dense that moss grows where grass used to be, a cathedral of shade I’m sure Dad never intended. Those maples are not gonna last. Only pine and oak and cedars live longer than a human lifetime. Birches’ lives are short. They die probably at the age my dad was when cancer felled him, whereas the maples will outlast me. They’ll outlive me unless somebody cuts them down or they fall in a big storm.

Life changes. Dad’s birches are gone.

Back at home, the dying red maple is shading my room. In these days of smoke-filled yellow skies that block the blazing sun, the scorching heat, and burnt-down towns, I need that red maple to provide relief.

We called our tree guy, another arborist that we rely on for large jobs like cutting down a dozen dead ash trees at the cottage. He climbed down from his big green truck, and as he crossed the garden, he surveyed our rich red crabapple, the thriving hawthorn, and the shivering aspen, before stopping in the dappled shade of the red maple. He said it’s root-bound, which often happens with these trees, and though he’d never plant one because they’re an invasive species, he said, “Sure, it’s under stress, and it’s dying, who isn’t? But it’s not endangering anybody. It’s not going to fall on your house. It’s not time to take drastic action.”

So we are not doing anything about the red maple.

Why do some people want to cut down all the trees?

Let me know a little bit about you as I share little bits about me. Please feel free to read the Archive.

If today’s story connected with your heart, you will probably enjoy my novels. They aren’t all the same flavour, but they all come from the same brain: curious, wry, emotionally nosy, and very interested in what people do when life gets life-y.

Start with Odd Mom Out if you like bad best friends, terrible mothers, bratty daughters, aging, reinvention, and the humiliating business of being human in public.

For a darker and more emotionally intense story in which a man must go back to his hometown and face the music while his girlfriend is left behind to figure out what’s happening on her own: Where the Night Winds Wail.

For more about me and my books, please visit my website, sandyday.ca