There is a giant spruce tree in my front yard, probably planted when the house was built in the 1950s. For some reason, I believe Iheard somewhere that you got a tree for your front yard as part of the house building deal.
When my first husband and I bought the house at the end of 2001, the front yard was the second thing we redid (after the kitchen floor and new appliances). With the help of our neighbor, the two tore out everything but the tree leaving us a clean slate to create something new. The grass had already been taken out and one of those awful fake river rock scene put in its place when we bought the house and we wanted to do something better.
My dad was very into trees. He planted a lot of trees at our house in Naperville which was great until the later years when my parents were raking endlessly in the fall. But he also seemed to keep up with the trees, trimming them periodically, and this was my failure.
The spruce hadn’t been trimmed since well before the divorce and I remember times when people would stop and look at the tree. I felt as if I were being judged, that I hadn’t taken care of the tree, that everyone had an opinion about the tree’s care.
But we decided a few weeks ago that we needed to have it trimmed, mostly because the pool guy told me that he was slated to open a pool that day and the customer called and told him not to come because the neighbor’s 50-foot tree had fallen into the pool and destroyed the cover. While my tree isn’t in danger of hitting my pool, it is in danger of hitting my house and I had fallen trees at my Naperville house more than once.
I worried that I had failed the tree. I hadn’t watered it enough, I hadn’t had it trimmed it enough.
But there was something else– I watched a neighbor a very long time ago have to have her tree taken down. The tree was in the front and she was crying in the backyard because she couldn't watch. The tree was a metaphor for her marriage that was ending.
Then I saw a tree across the street have to be removed and the sadness of my neighbor Joan (although I couldn’t tell her that the removal of the tree meant I had a better view of the mountains). They had built that house and I’m sure she had photos of her daughters growing up by the tree.
With everything that has happened in the last year or so, the idea of the losing the tree made me sad, but I was prepared that it might happen.
And it didn’t. It’s in good shape. It’s been trimmed. And my road ahead looks a bit clearer again.