We decimate things at our whim. The leaves from
the three arbutus trees bothered both of us. He was out there, too frequently,
with his broom and long handled dustpan, clearing his cobble-paved driveway,
his immaculately swept pathways, his manicured flower beds. On the other hand,
once in a long while, I cleared the fallen leaves on my side with my noisy
battery-powered blower, and stuffed the fragmented offal into a black bag,
ready for the garbage. Both of us were bothered by the fallen leaves, he much
more than my little bit. And right from the start, when I first called the
property mine, he’d let me know that he ‘feared that those trees would have to
come down, someday’. After all, with that smaller one on my property line, and the
two larger ones within his, they obscured my view, but not his.
Birds frequented them. Spring-time Robins. Summer-time Northern flickers. Winter-time Chickadees. Autumn Sparrows. And even resting hummingbirds. But the live leaves, bristling and waving, sometimes hid the birds’ flittings from us. Then too, the wide-spread branches reached up into the sky, a good fifteen feet high, and their rake did impede our ocean view. We’d see so much more of The Strait were they to come down. But I was most reluctant. Trees scrub the sky clean. Trees give life. Trees take decades to grow. Trees take precedence over our own preferences, surely?
But that neighbour also had a magnificent and deeply green and very tall Deodara tree. At some fifty feet in height, and at least twelve feet wide, it not only blocked some of our own vista, but also dropped its messy pine needles atop his other neighbor’s glass-top greenhouse. “For years now,” he uttered, uncertainly, “I’ve been meaning to cut down this tree, much as I don’t want to.”
Thing is, for most of us, excising the detritus of our lives, let alone the obvious, is a difficult thing to do. All over the yards through our very human existence there are the discards and rotten boats and rusted trucks and the heaps of rubbish that clutter our lives. There is the obvious. There is the dubious. There is the valuable, (which may not be useful.) And then there’s junk.
So too for our fears. We indeed have fear for a reason. It serves us. It can ensure that we are safe. But then too, our whole lives become conditioned to fear; fear that we are insufficient; fear that we do not measure up; fear that we do not have the latest; do not have the best; do not have what he or she has; and we can fear that we are not as worthy as any other. We do not wish to be called ‘cheap’. And so, commercialism feeds on our fears. So too do our politicians. So too do even our friends and families and neighbours. One ‘needs’ to ‘measure up’.
And so, we can hack away at the tall poppies within us. We can topple the evolving trees that may grow up from inside us, and we can scare away the birds of our thoughts that may choose otherwise to roost. We take on the constructs of others before us; we can adopt their religions; we often adopt their political stripes; we do sing beside their flags; and we follow the queues that would lead us to the troughs of acceptability, lest, like an escaped prisoner hurrying away from the ubiquitous wall, the spotlight falls on us, and we are arrested, recaptured, or shot.
Those trees on our property lines came down. All four of them. The sky grew bigger. But did our worldview? Did we really contribute to the health of the whole? Did we really gain in our yard’s value so that some future person may benefit, let alone ourselves? And do the birds now merely find some other resting place; just as does one’s own thoughts, when there simply is too much of the mind’s fluttering of fallen leaves with which to contend?
The trees were mulched. All four of them. Like letters of the alphabet in scrabble, their sense was reduced to nothing. And the snarl of chainsaws and growling augers eventually left too. So too did the birds. (But at least that awful volume of leaves shall no more be a bother, eh?)
