It starts out as a wee seed (acorn, chestnut, bract, key) and becomes a place of shade, coolness, an air filter, and oxygen creator.  It is a productive member of the environment for fifty to hundreds of years. When it loses a branch in a wind it becomes viewed as a danger.  So it is chopped down, chipped up and forgotten.  There is no celebration of its life, and its death is unremarkable.  People in the past believed that trees had spirits and power- the dryads of Greek mythology, the tree of life, tree spirits and fairies of Celtic myth.  I think, with the growth of technology and the lose of belief in the unknown, society has lost touch with the magic of nature.

A favourite tree of my children is being taken down today.  It was a big old willow.  We thought its end would be soon because it had lost a few big branches in storms over the last year or so.  I think, like a lot of things, you can know something but not really believe it until it is actually happening.  Today was the day of its demise.  I thought I would take this space to reflect on this tree.

On hot days, the tree was a place we migrated to hang out underneath.  It was a splash of colour in the winter with its yellow sticks and twigs.  It was the first to get the haze of yellow-green leaves in the springtime.  It had a wonderful warty, lumpy trunk that my three younger kids could not reach all the way around and would look for faces in.  They had named the tree Fred, because it was that kind of tree.  I am hoping that a new tree will be planted in its place to take up the role that Fred had fulfilled in this world.  I worry that this won’t happen.  The expense of the removal of a tree that grows to the size Fred will be fresh in the budget-ly minded even though wee and decorative trees do not fulfill a fraction of the role a tree like Fred did.

We will miss Fred, especially as the summer commences.  Thankfully we still have Ted.