Long before we lived here, someone planted an ornamental pear tree right outside the kitchen window. In our years of inhabiting this place, it has been home to squirrels scampering up and down its trunk, frolicking in the branches. Most mornings, it sings, or rather the birds perched on its branches sing and fill the kitchen with music before I’ve turned on any electronic device. Once, a snake, six feet long, black and terrifying, slithered up its trunk as we watched both in horror and fascination.
Sophia Nicholas via Unsplash
In the spring, the blossoms burst white and remain green for all of summer. They yellow in the fall as they drop to the ground, joining the neighboring trees in scattering the driveway with a carpet of autumnal beauty.
Kids climb its low limbs and recently my husband was up in the tree, contorting around the trunk to saw a few branches that were long overdue for a pruning. Since we’ve lived here, some of the tree’s upper branches have scraped against our neighbor’s second-floor windows.
So one day this week, without notice, our landlord showed up with a hand saw, then a chain saw, and began cutting away the branches my husband could not reach. For an entire afternoon, large limbs crashed to the ground outside our kitchen windows, seemingly dropped from the sky. As our landlord dragged limb after limb to his waiting trailer, I could only wonder what would be left of the tree when he was finished.
Read the rest of this post at Putting on the New, where I write on the 12th of each month.
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