A New View

This poor old gal. She was rotten through, and had been for several years. It was a Manitoba maple that was likely planted when the house was built in 1946. If I was a seventy-odd-years-old tree, I’d be a bit cranky and rotten as well.

She stood at the side of the house and we took her for granted. She was just … there. A part of our lives that we thought would never change.

She’d begun to rot from the roots up a few years ago, and miraculously didn’t land on our house in the big windstorm we had roar through here a couple of summers back. But we examined her a couple of months ago, and it was clear we had to cut her down. She could have toppled at any moment, taking out the power to two houses (which is the last thing anyone needs right now as we’re all shopping from our freezers), and causing a great deal of damage to our home.

One of the benefits of being married to a barber is that he knows someone in nearly every trade. He called his arborist buddy and he assessed the situation.

It was over in under an hour. I couldn’t believe how quickly the tree came down.

I admit to weeping through most of the surgery. I love the old, tall trees in my neighbourhood (the oldest one in Red Deer). Behind our house is a small park, filled with trees that go back in some cases to nearly the turn of the last century. It feels like my own personal forest.

~~

A few days before this happened, Stu went on a window cleaning rampage. He pulled out all the panes, washed them outside, and then replaced them. We’ve been meaning to do it for years, and now that time is meaningless and he has more of it than he wants, he was doing busy work. I have a very large window to my right and I love watching the crabapple tree come into flower in the spring, and watch the poplars green up in the park.

After the tree came down and the arborists had hauled off the wood for their families (don’t @ me. We asked them to take it), and cleaned up, I felt the absence of the tree to the depths of me. They had left three stumps at different heights so that we can use it as a plant stand.

~~

I opened the bedroom curtains the next morning, and was hit with a blast of bright. The combination of the clean windows and the missing tree made for some pretty spectacular sunlight bouncing off the white house to the west of us.

I walked into the bathroom, and stopped. I said out loud, “I’ll be go to hell. I’ve never seen this view.” I opened my office curtains and was hit in the face with brightness. The arborists had to give the crabapple tree that normally fills my window a pretty serious haircut and had to cut my favourite branch off so that the cherry picker could go over the top of it to reach the dead tree.

My office, bedroom, and bathroom views are drastically altered, but I must accept it. Gradually, I will. I’m embracing the brightness and the new things out my window.

~~

As you know I like to say, “What the hell does this tree story have to do with editing my own work, Beach?” And as usual, I say, “A shit-ton, as it happens!”

When I vocalized that I’d never seen the clear bright sky out my bathroom window, an analogy about writing and editing occurred to me. Cut stuff down and change the view. Trim and see what else is out there (or in there, in the case of your work). Do some radical chainsawing and see what the world looks like afterward.

Embrace that new view. It’s brighter and clearer, and you might come to a place where you find that even though you loved those words, they might need to go to save the whole. In my case, the tree needed to go to save the house.

And you don’t even have to clean the windows.