This year, the mere mention of “dead trees” has elicited all kinds of negative connotations – spurring emotions, prompting opinions, instigating debates. Whether we’re discussing droughts or gypsy moths, the method of removing hazardous trees from roadsides or the expense from our own properties, the ones that crashed onto the roof or caused us to lose electricity yet again, conversations on dead trees have provoked responses ranging from grumbling to rage. After the saw dust settles, the dangers have subsided from our roads and in our yards, and the controversies surrounding their removal fade, what we’re left with is the actual loss.

Losing an old tree is like losing an old friend. When a tree is purposefully felled, the sound signifies the health of its environs, yet it was a different feeling when the tree in front of my parents’ house finally met its demise – first the crown surrendered to the electric company’s trimming, then all but three branches were lost to storms, then only the broken trunk remained, and now a stump is all that’s left of the tree that I swung from as a child. We’re very fortunate if we have them – the tree we once swung from, climbed, sat beneath for picnics, the one that housed the tree house, sheltered the hammock.

In these last few years, we’ve lost most of the maple in front of our stone wall, echoing the certain fate of the one across the street from it. We’ve lost half of the branches of a crab apple and half of the weeping cherry’s fountain of limbs. We needed to remove the thirty pine trees that marked our property’s border after winter storms ravished them, their diagonal trunks precariously leaning against deciduous trees, lining our lawn with perilous threats. The rum cherries in this area are now ridden with some sort of disease and will need to be removed this year. I’ll miss their lustrous garnet trunks and their spring confetti of flowers. At my grandmother’s homestead, two memorable trees – once the sapling maple and spruce planted when my mother and my uncle were children – are gone, and the crippled remains of the century old apple trees are a tragic reminder of what was once a charming orchard.

My mother’s sycamore, her favorite tree, grows larger and stronger every year, the crocus she scattered at its feet the first announcement of spring on the hill. Sycamores are currently subject to a life-threatening disease, and I dread the day if this one succumbs, for its loss will mean so much more.

Still, we’re not as unfortunate as many of our neighbors. Those who lost “living fences”, all the oaks on their lawns, leaving them devoid of shade and vulnerable to destructive crashes. At the very least, the character of their properties is changed for a long while. There are sections of Goodwin Forest which are unrecognizable to those who have frequented them for years. Trailwood as well — acres of thick woodland which are now bald hills. The once wooded alleys of Eleventh Section, Sand Hill and Windy Hill, North Bigelow and Brook Road have become fields of rubbled branches and pyramids of lumber, exposing unfamiliar vistas and stripping properties of their privacy. Of course, it’s necessary for our safety and for the health of the environment – yet at the very least, it’s disorienting.

The venerable old favorites are the most difficult to lose — imagine the loss of the stately elms that once graced Main Street! Pete Vertefeuille wrote “The Demise of an Old Ash Tree” in May of 2015 to honor the grand old living sculpture on Station Road, and the Gazette commemorated many of the milestones of the historic “constitution” oak in the village, with Bob Burgoyne and Sue Hochstetter chronicling its life and its loss in the July 2018 issue with “Our Streetscape Changes”, illustrating its significance, visually and historically, to the town. We often locate the foundations of old homes in the woods with “bride and groom trees”, the New England custom of planting twin saplings to flank the entrance of a couple’s new house. They remain where the home and even the rubble of its cellar has filled in and disappeared – these long ago testaments to new life.

Because that’s really what a tree symbolizes for us – life. We recognize this as soon as we plant one – such hope in those sturdy saplings. So many plans – picnics, hammocks; so many aspirations for its strength, its generosity; so many promises for posterity. We plant a tree with the understanding that it will probably outlive us, and that’s, in part, the point. We see its value almost instantly – birds visiting its branches, nesting in the spring, squirrels and chipmunks scrambling around it in autumn. As it grows it offers fruit, nuts, shade, branches to climb, its foliage gloriously announcing the seasons. And toward its end, it becomes a haven for insects, and then eventual wildlife, woodpeckers the first to indicate its demise as it slowly disintegrates to a stump, revealing its years in its rings – a history of the storms it’s weathered, the dry seasons, the floods — its decomposition providing a fertile soil for its offspring.

Which is the place in their long and illustrious lives where we find ourselves now – these sheltering corridors, these stalwart sentries, these solitary old friends who embraced us on our return home – now fallen across their own shadows. So after the controversies on their removal are forgotten, the bills have been paid, and the adjustments are made to our gardens with the variances of sunlight, and to our properties with their altered views, we’re left with only one response: plant new ones.

Dayna McDermott