Can anything good come from a 40-foot-tall tree crashing down in your front yard?
Oddly enough, yes. In fact, you can actually end up feeling blessed.
It's strange how some things happen. Take the freak windstorm that barreled through a week ago. At 1 a.m., rocks started pounding against our upstairs bedroom window. At least, that's what it sounded like.
My husband ran to the window and slammed it shut to keep the wind and driving rain out. From that vantage point he watched the madness of tree limbs swirling like an egg beater running through them, then suddenly said, "Oh, no, there goes the Russian olive."
The only way a tree can "go" is from vertical to horizontal, which is precisely what happened. That blasting wind pushed so hard at the 15-year-old tree that its thick roots finally snapped and it simply laid down -- across our lawn and the neighbor's.
This tree, planted from a seed of a tree at our former home and brought with us when we moved, now lay in all its gigantic glory on the lawn. The mourning of its loss was quickly overwhelmed by the question of, What on earth do we do now?
That problem pounded in my mind the next morning as I sat on its trunk-turned-bench, dwarfed by its massive branches reaching up into the sky almost as high as when it stood upright, and at the other end, its tangled roots ripped from the ground, dangling weirdly in the air. My son stopped by to view the mess and said simply, "Don't worry, Mom. We can take care of this."
"We can take care of this." That was a sweet moment, hearing that from a grown son. The "we" he meant were his other siblings and their spouses. My role was to round up a chain saw and a couple of trailers. At the end of the day, after they finished their work days, the kids showed up to "take care of this."
Enter the second angel -- a neighbor who walked over after he got home from his own long day of work to see the damage. He studied the situation for a moment, then headed back to his house, calling over his shoulder, "I'll be back."
And he was. With his chain saw and his entire evening donated to our cause, he sawed that entire tree apart, limb by limb, handling his saw so expertly that if I hadn't known better, I would have sworn it was his profession. The others grabbed the limbs and dragged them to the trailers as he sliced them away from the trunk. One trailer was filled, hauled to the landfill before it closed for the evening, and brought back ready for another load.
Enter the third angels -- another neighbor couple who pitched in to stack limbs, then drove the trailers to the landfill to empty them.
By the end of the evening, the dead giant was gone. Like the proverbial question, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time," we learned you dispose of a 40-foot-tree one limb at a time. As the last limb was loaded, I looked around and just shook my head in wonder.
The depth of the blessing of caring, helping family and friends didn't sink in completely until the next day when I drove around the area and saw several other families also dealing with dead giants in their yards. Looking out my window, all I see now is a large, empty hole waiting to be filled. But what is already filled is my heart. My husband and I couldn't have taken care of that thing alone.
While stacking limbs, one of my daughters had commented on how much force it must have taken to uproot the tree. It's true that the wind gust that toppled the tree was uncommonly powerful. But this experience revealed other, far more powerful forces, like children who grow up to become thoughtful, confident adults who know how to "take care of this," and friends who come to the aid of someone in need at the drop of a ... tree.
Some things just can't be uprooted.
You may contact D. Louise Brown at maven_55@yahoo.com or leave a message with her editor at 801-625-4223.
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