Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude For Trees

I'm obsessed with trees. Or I guess I should say I'm obsessed with admiring trees—I can't be bothered to spoil the mystery by memorizing names out of a guidebook. But in the photo albums for every trip I've ever taken, there's at least one random tree photo. My husband doesn't quite get my firm belief that the way a tree curls in some new somewhere is every bit as much the point of a trip for me as noting (yes, yes, very nice) the exact spot where idiot one slew idiot two during a heated argument about some peccadillo you can be is no where near worth dying over . And he absolutely can't understand why I'm totally bored by the thought of visiting Chicago and absolutely charmed by the idea of flying across country to California and renting a car to drive along coastal roads for hours to reach a Redwood forest so I can stand at the base of trees I can't even come close to putting my arms around and stare up in abject wonder at just how small I really am.

"But monkey," he says. "They're just big trees."

"You are SO not getting the point," I tell him as I make a mental note to put the Redwoods on my wish list of solo vacations. Because the only thing worse than not seeing the Redwoods at all would be seeing them with someone who glances up for a second, nods, and says: yup, big trees.

This morning, Mike got to see just how passionately (and perhaps frighteningly) attached to trees I can be. Today, the big tree behind our condo building (oak, I think) was scheduled for a trim. Our condo association has been waging an annual battle against a troop of squirrels who treat the branches of that tree as a causeway to the relative luxury of our warm attic space. After deciding that the cost of rehabilitating our squirrel squatters has grown too high, all of the condo owners agreed it was time to shut down the rodent expressway above us: the tree would be trimmed.

So it wasn't a surprise to me when the chainsaw chorus in my backyard stirred me awake this morning, but what floored me was the discovery that the genteel pruning I was expecting looked more like an amputation. One of the main boughs had been stripped of every spider limb, and there was a hard-hat-wearing guy in a bucket seat chopping the bony branch down piece by piece.

My hand flew to my head which felt immediately hot. To say I flipped out would be an understatement. There were curses. Impassioned pleas to my husband to stop the slaughter, a frantic call to the condo association president during which I managed to relay that whatever she'd told them to do, the butchers had gone tree-toppling mad, that a quarter of the tree was gone, and there were neighbors on the ground looking up at the workers with their hands on their hips.

The condo association president tried to tell me that all was well, explain that we had a legal right to cut the branches that affected our property, that a tree can and will survive the loss of one or more main boughs, that she'd come back to check on things. But she seemed to be missing the headline: a big and beautiful branch had been sliced down in pieces.

All I could think about was the permanence of this mistake. All I could do was watch helplessly as the wood that used to be a bough was being turned into mulch, and, when I hung up the phone, I cried. Hard. Because a beautiful branch that yesterday had wended its way out and up, reaching and reaching and reaching, had been cut down and erased in less time than it took for me to snap fully awake.

What is it about trees that's so primal for me? Is it the way they yield to the wind on one day and stand tall again the next? The way they radiate natural beauty in every season whether people bother to notice them or not? The way they still my breath and mind when I take a second to stop and watch? The way they start in the mess and the muck of the dirt to burst forth and patiently, patiently grow into this spiderweb tangle that reaches higher and higher and higher? I don't know the right reason any more than I can tell you the name of the short and gnarly trees that line the path in the park on Crest Avenue in Winthrop that I go out of my way to walk under every day. I just know that I like the way liking trees makes me feel. That I'm grateful that something so simple can please me so much.

Now that operation tree top is done, I can see that the end product isn't as brutal as it looked like it was going to be while the chopping was taking place. Something about seeing the branch fall brutal bit by brutal bit was too hard to take. I can see now that the tree is fine, or mostly fine. That all will be well. All will be fine. Still the visceral reaction lingered, so I calmed myself with a tour of the trees I've captured in my travels around the world, and shared a handful. There are a couple from Australia (Watson Bay in Sydney and Uluru in the Outback), another from a gorilla habitat at the Bronx Zoo, one from a farm in Northern New Hampshire, one from a Folk Festival in the Berkshires, and another from the lovely Llanberis, Wales. I bet you can't tell for sure which is which. And maybe that's the magic of the trees— their growth and striving is absolutely borderless.