Out the window from my desk there is a tall tree whose branches bend over the roofs of the buildings next to it. The leaves catch the wind, as leaves do, they move around. This morning, working at my desk, I found myself staring at this tree.
I used to never understand why people would get so sad or so angry when an individual tree was chopped down — like because it was too old or because the roots were starting to come up through the sidewalk. Usually they’d be righteously indignant, like the tree had done nothing to hurt anyone, just provided shade and comfort and a nice place for the eye to land, and I would feel like I had to feel like this tree really deserved to live, but mostly I thought it was a pity that ultimately had not much to do with much. That’s what it is to be a tree in a city, or even in the country; sometimes you just have to get chopped down.
I stared at the tree some more, this morning, and started to picture myself working at this desk for the next year, maybe the next two years, the next five. I thought, I will stare at this tree every day. I thought, It will be here when things change or stay the same; it will be here when I am sad; it will be here when I am happy; it will be here when I finally buy that room divider to put in the middle of this giant room so that I don’t have to see my bed while I work. I do not like to see my bed while I work.
I stared at the tree some more and then I thought about every tree that’s had some significance to me. There’s the one under which I buried a time capsule in my grandmother’s yard when I was a kid. There’s the plum tree I climbed at my childhood home in Buenos Aires. There’s the evergreen in another home, later, which I also climbed, though that climbing was less fun. As far as I know, they’re all still there.
Would it make a difference if they weren’t?
I get it now, why people get so sad when a tree gets cut down. It’s simpler to think about the tree being here than it is to think about me being here. In a year, two, five, I will be a different person, whereas the tree — really, the idea of the tree — will be exactly the same. It’s easier to deposit hope into the tree than it is into my own life. It’s easier to feel grief when the tree dies than it is to feel it in the dozens of moments that call for it every day.
I was talking with a friend earlier about how the pandemic has stripped us of our usual regular markers of the passing of time; we’re all floating around in one big time-soup, untethered. We might’ve been doing that anyway, before, except then we used holidays, birthdays, end-of-school, back-to-school, etc. as anchors. We deposit our pasts and our futures into things outside of us. Why not also trees? We let the idea that the tree will be there forever make us feel better about the fact that we won’t. It takes the pressure off. The tree will be there forever so what does it matter what I do on any given day? And then the chopping, and then the devastation, and then the end.
I do not love the tree because it is outside of me. I love the tree because it is like me. It does its tasks every day. It is both still and moving. It is just a tree. It does not know when its time will come.