Was it a spring storm? It must have been. Or summer? Yes, maybe even late summer…because there was fruit on the trees. Eighteen trees blew down, were blown over…and some were apple trees. She was maybe eight years old…when the big northeastern came down from Canada and wiped out just about all of her Gramma and Grampa’s front yard orchard. There were white birches, too, tangled into the fruit-laden branches, and limbs all a kilter in the front yard: big yard to her little eyes, a foresty jungle all tied up in what had been a quiet garden of sweet apples…trees not too tall that you couldn’t climb them. She’d been able to swing her feet up into a low fork or two and swing herself up into a small tree…a tree maybe her size, the tree young too.
But suddenly a huge darkness in the sky came whooshing down: some winged enormous beast of a creature made of angry air…and then the weeks—summer? fall?—came of handsome young men with saws and muscles and sweaty arms and chests…on cleanup, digging out what was dirt, uncovering the grassy open parts that had been borders to flower beds. Branches torn and twisted and down, arms and torsos on her tree friends torn down, off, thrown into a foresty jungle.
She got sort of used to it. It took long enough to be “cleaned up” that she got sort of used to playing in it…the aftermath. She was fascinated by the remnants of the devastating storm. She watched the young men, the clean-up crew. She doesn’t remember her Gramma and Grandpa in the overturned foresty—what once was orchard—garden. She doesn’t remember them, the adults—not her parents either—doesn’t and didn’t have any idea of how they felt when they stood deep in the limbs of their plant children… How heart-sad they must have been…but she was too young to have even a glimmer of real sadness for them.
For her, so green and young herself, at first it was a magical—temporarily magical—new world. The scents of ripe apples, green leaves, sawdust fresh from young deciduous trees too, like men cut down in their prime. Youth and Death, and she played in it…fascinated by the young men...the nineteen-year-olds?...who survived the war of the storm? and came in brave and strong to mop and shore up the remains, to cut up and carry off the bodies of the fallen, to leave, after much work, an open field to be seeded or sodded, to put a soft kind of cover onto the battleground of the slaughter, of the tragedy.
So many decades later…old enough now to be the gramma…she abhors seeing them cut down even so-called dead branches of any single tree.