Bereaved of an oak tree

The feeling heightens as soon as summer starts to creep in and the sun splashes blinding streams of light through glass windows.

Allowed only white blinds or drapes for shade by strata rules, one, like me, suffering from hyper astigmatism, would often face the wall or slink into cubed spaces like the bathroom for relief, and though hilarious, I have even worn shades fitted to my prescription glasses inside the apartment once.

But the truth masked by such apparent quirkiness has to do with my missing the oak tree felled three years ago, quite a bereavement relived not only with the coming of another summer but also, sometimes passing by the pockmarked stump left to further die.

Amazing how a tree, among other living things, encrypts itself in one’s being.

Yet, the oak seemed to have enfolded me since that first time when, with a friend and a realtor, we stepped into this apartment; “love at first sight” had hit me in that perfect time of day as the sun slanting from the east conspired to cast broad leaf shadows on the white walls, and I surrendered to its promises.

It woke me sheathed in virgin snow during winters, a heavenly apparition that stayed through early darkness. As if haloed by a neon aura from young leaves in springtime, it suffused my spirit, which the cold had worn out; when fully crowned in the summer, it had let through only crafted sunbeams while with the wind, in a whole-day leaf-shadow play on the walls seemed to giggle and laugh, finally to blaze with the shifting hues of glorious dying in the fall.

While feasting merely with my senses like a daily dose of tree-romance, I glossed over other creatures it harbored—sparrows, as if always wind-borne, black squirrels that put on trapeze numbers in between gathering acorns, powdery moths almost invisible in their translucence at metamorphosis from fuzzy worms feeding on its tender parts, aphids breeding in millions in leaves they glued basket-like, and buzzing wasps feeding on the aphids.

As dark spots started to stain the leaves and took longer for it to sprout while an increasing swarm of cotton-like wings landed on the rose in our terrace, and later coated the leaves of the evergreen, discussions about its illness from infestation pitched during strata council meetings. Still, blinded by my “secret affair” with it, I abstained from voting for its assisted death; from Alana’s consultation with an arborist, and pointing out the process as spelled out in the city’s bylaws on the felling of a tree, the oak declared sick beyond cure had to be felled. On the appointed day, I waited to watch—what a masochist, Patricia, a British friend, had tagged me.

Here’s how that morning unfolded: The Cedar Ridge Tree Care van promptly parked at 10:30 a.m., spilling out men in hard hats, steel-toed boots, and orange and neon vests to size it up, as if a dying tree bore weapons. On the terrace relishing for the last time its dappled shade, I winced as the shredder groaned, signaling the chainsaw handler to grind the air: its dismembering had begun–twigs first, and then, branches with wan diseased leaves tumbling into Ken’s rhododendrons, and soon, with the trunk portioned three feet each left nothing but a stump baring its age—so young at 20 something, when it could have ripened into a thousand-year old—and then, the gaping emptiness.

Unrelenting, Patricia withheld comforting words, and instead, chided me over my maudlin thoughts.
“Elevate your bereavement,” she said, “think of it in terms of naval and long ships in conquests, panels for distinguished halls, royal thrones and also, barrels to ferment wine and wood chips to smoke meat and fish. Browse through some coat of arms and find its worth,” she added, affirming in the end that my bereavement has not been for naught.