A History with Trees

The sun has yet to cast its yellow squares upon my bedroom floor, but my father no doubt has been up for hours. Even with plugs in my ears I can hear him, pacing and fidgeting, as if he's behind schedule and I'm the one keeping him from his appointment. I turn over in bed and find him hovering outside my door, garbed in his work clothes: a wash-dingy golf shirt and kellygreen polyester pants––items packed in his suitcase along with his other essentials. He leans in, lips moving, words muffled.

"Shane's house is good lookin'?"

"Huh?" I pull out an earplug, rub a spark or two into my head.

"Ya say that chainsaw's working?"

"Oh," I mutter. "Should be." And with that I have both given my blessing and surrendered my day to him.

He turns away, permission in his steps, and passes my mother, who stops for a moment her spray of water at the sink; then he strides across the oak floor of the living room and down the steps to the first level of the house where all of his sounds become faint and speculative. I jump into some jeans and boots and head downstairs myself––knowing all too well the sorts of things that can happen when my father is left to his own devices––only to find him in the garage, already having oiled the saw.

By now we are both certain of the day's agenda, and so we walk wordlessly to my yard, a 20-acre mountainous incline bristling with thousands of ponderosa pine and a small and straggling population of cedar trees, all of which cling to massive rock outcroppings and grassy, gulchy slopes. He's been waiting for this day ever since I mentioned the tree a few months back, and, as he makes his way crookedly and unsteadily at times ahead of me, I remember in my just-kindled brain that, even without a tree to chop down, this is a momentous occasion for my father. Today is his 81st birthday.

My parents have made their way across the country to visit me here in Colorado. At their own home in Florida, Reno is known for planting trees, which in the heat and humidity grow to gigantic proportions until he must cut them down. "Had to cut down the mango," he'd say. "Got too big. And not much fruit." Or he'd say, "Ya know, grapefruit trees have a lifespan of 25 years, and this one is, oh, probably 26, 27." Then there was the recent occasion when his Norfolk Island pine towered a good 100 feet skyward, having grown over the years from a small plant that my father picked up at a nursery, eventually panicking the neighbors in their flimsy, prefab homes into concluding that even level-one hurricane winds could topple it and threaten a wide radius. He didn't chop down the Norfolk himself, but I understand it was quite the event and took a professional crew to dismantle that fast-growing monolith. But these adventures I only heard about over 2,000 miles of phone lines.

My father and I have our own history with trees, starting in 1994 when he and my mother came to visit at a house I owned on Cuyler Avenue in Chicago. It was a rambling Victorian with an overproductive mulberry tree out front, which, according to my own neighbors, deserved to be taken down what with all the mess it made and the fact that the birds pooped purple and regularly stained the yellow car owned by the guy next door. But I loved her nonetheless. The tree was by all means a "her" with her womanly round shape, her gracefulness, her fruity seeds that she spread all over my sidewalk and porch. I adored the way she filled my entire front yard with her branches, the way she reached down to rustle the hair of children who reached up to pick her tart berries in summer.

One of her limbs hung a bit too low, though, like a gate across...