Friday firesmith – in memory of trees: the fallen

On April the 12^th of 2023, a freak rainstorm dropped nearly a foot of water in six hours. The sound on the metal roof was surreal. A dull roar that simply did not end, the rain began with a vengeance at midnight and I dozed off and on until five then got up. There was no chance of getting the dogs out until the rain stopped. At six it was a slow drizzle and my little piece of the world had flooded.

The house was okay. We were safe. But the pond spilled over into the yard in a big way. Two more hurricanes followed that year. Most of the back of my property was underwater for two and a half years.

The Big Pine Tree near the pond died slow. The Leaning Live Oak fell over on Day One. A host of smaller trees fell or simply drowned in time.

The Slingshot Tree, a small water oak with two main branches died first. One of the last to die was the leaning tree where Sam, Sam, the Happy Hound dug under the roots to make a den. Sam would hunker down there, and Bert would try to drag him out. They would play like this for hours.

Lucas and Lilith played this game, too, much younger animals than Bert and Sam, they used the same toy in the same way. I remember a Black Racer making his way under those roots and stopping Sam from going after him.

Tuesday night I heard a thump and went back to sleep. The next morning the tree was on the ground.

I knew it would be. It had died late in the flooding, but was still dead. The trees surrounding the pond, so many of them are dead now, so many still standing, a feast for woodpeckers, but so many dead.

You can try to dictate terms to nature but then you are no longer living within nature. The drought lasted for eight months after the pond finally dried up. Now, rain has returned and we’ve gotten three inches of rain this week, which seems to be a lot but the fires in Georgia still burn east of here.

Homes destroyed, lives disrupted, smoke covers the eastern part of Georgia like the dire mists of Mordor. The sun rises red over in that part of the world. Their trees have burned, and mine have drowned.

I know most of the trees on my property. None fall within notice. I have been here long enough to see a place where no tree stood to have a tree, and the first bird nest. I have seen giants die and fall. I have seen small trees grow beyond my own height and reach for starlight.

But this day, I say to you this: A tree that holds memories of my pack has fallen.

These words are a memorial, and they are grief.

Take Care,

Mike

The tree broken, not yet fallen over. I still wonder how its root system held

Here it’s landed on the pile I started when I was able to start moving stuff out of the yard, and away from the fences. It landed with its kin. All the bushy looking stuff was once so shaded nothing grew there. The loss of tree has triggered a population explosion of smaller plants.