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Felled, Forgotten
The trucks rolled up shortly before 9, the rising sun slowly pulling the chill of night-rain from the damp earth. The crew made their way into the neighbor’s backyard and by 10 one brave climber was digging spurs into bark. The gas-powered thieving had a strange elegance to it, slow and strategic limbing all the way up, the most unwieldy branches hastily knotted and threaded to the ground, the process moving higher and higher, then a climactic reversal of direction as sections from the top half of the now bare trunk were lopped off to fall in huge concussive blasts that shook our windows. These pieces — and their impact — grew larger during the slow descent of the climber as his saw was forced to make increasingly deeper radial forays through the wooden spacetime of the trunk. The air was heavy with the cloying smell of fresh cuts. A secret, concentric history undone and scattered as sawdust shimmered everywhere, spell-like, as it drifted though blades of light. The trees had a combined lifespan of centuries, I’m sure, and even though the saw was screaming for most of the day, what struck me as I sat and watched was how quickly they came down.
At one point I turned to discover that all four of us were on the deck, watching — me, my wife, our two children, necks craned, each of us naming something silently in our hearts. I thought about words like hewn and cleft, but they seemed antiquated, timelost, ill-suited…
