The Death of a Dear Friend

Question: If a tree falls in the middle of the night and everyone is a asleep, does it make a sound? Hell yes, it does! It makes the most hideously loud, cracking, grinding, scraping noise that you will ever hear in your life. Unfortunately, I am speaking from first-hand experience. Our beautiful 100+ year old ash tree in our back yard fell over Wednesday night. It happened around midnight. Needless to say, it scared THE PISS out of us. Ruanita and I both immediately jumped from bed, yelling "What the hell was that?!?" Aside from the damage....electric stripped off the house, power lines down, fence hit, gas grill destroyed, lawn chairs split in half, gutter damaged.....I find myself today mourning the loss of a wonderful tree. We can buy a new grill. The fence and the gutters can be repairs. The electric has already been fixed. The house can be put back in order. However, the yard will never be the same without that tree.

When we first moved into our house five years ago. I absolutely fell in love with the towering ash tree in our back yard. The tree is unusual in that it has four trunks. Four HUGE trucks grow from a common point in the ground, to tower above the house....and the neighbors houses and the alley. The meeting place of those four trunks has become a favorite play place for our kids. That tree has been "base" during many a game of tag. It has been a fort for my kids. It has been a clubhouse. It has been the site of numerous gorgeous pictures of the kids. It provides the shade that covers our entire backyard. It is THE focal point of our back yard.

Unfortunately, when one of the trunks fell, we learned that the entire tree is rotting from the inside out. Its unusual design--four trunks joined together at a common base--causes water to pool and sit on the base. The water seeps down and has rotted the tree from the ground up. The remaining three trunks will have to be removed, or they will inevitably fall one by one. Of course, we can't have that recipe for disaster sitting in our back yard, so the entire tree will have to be removed. Our yard will never be the same again without our old ash friend. We will plant a new tree, of course. However, I will never in my lifetime see a massive tree towering over our house again. I will miss her terribly.