June 10, 2024
Greetings from the sappy one,
Recently I deliberately spent thousands of dollars to get nothing. Nothing. The absence of something. That nothing. If you write it a few times you see the definition. No. Thing.
The fact is I hired a hit man to eliminate a problem. I didn’t want to, but it was a question of self-preservation. The assassin used a very particular set of skills. Skills acquired over a very long career. He also used a chainsaw.
A team of lumberjacks arrived at my house with a plethora of equipment designed to take down a giant tree that was bullying my family. I am told the tree was seventy-five feet tall, a mythical proportion given that my yardstick doesn’t go up that high.
In my new attempt to know things I learned that this tree was a White Pine, but I named it a Weeping Sap. (Sidenote, the lumberjacks also named me Weeping Sap, given my reaction after I deliberately paid them thousands of dollars to get nothing.) White Pines are not ordinarily aggressive, but recently this tree had been harassing my family by flinging sap in our general direction.
This was not ordinary sap; it was the industrial strength sap that can only be produced in this prodigious quantity by a behemoth White Pine. In the last few years the tree had made a career out of coating our deck and furniture, and anyone not moving nimbly, with a slather of sticky goo the likes of which once wiped out an entire generation of dinosaurs. Some parts of that last sentence may be made up.
The sap is immune to all methods of cleaning, sanding, scraping or burnishing, and is so persistent that even after two winters it is still potent enough to ruin an expensive pair of yoga pants. (Not mine.) It was like living with a neighbor who let his dog leave her La Brea Tarpit droppings behind.
And so we called in the hit men, a team of fearless lumberjacks, with their saws and hammers and trucks and lifts and grinders and tractors, and they went into battle. The tree resisted, but they were relentless, and when the sawdust settled, it was reduced to logs and limbs, no longer a threat to anyone’s yoga pants.
And when they left, I had exactly what I had paid for: nothing. The absence of the Weeping Sap.
Well, that’s not the entire truth. I got nothing and I got something else.
Before the day ended our house was filled with a new light, a brilliant glow that dissolved what had been permanent shadows. The yard was changed, the plants and trees which had once cowered under the White Pine seemed to pull themselves up, prouder. Grass was outlined in sun for the first time, even the weeds seemed happier. And there was sky. A new perspective, a new view of the sunset, and later, the stars. Even as I write this, I just glanced up to see this new arc of blue over the trees outside my window.
I’ll also mention that we can really see how dirty our windows are.
So perhaps I paid for nothing, and I got it. But nature abhors a vacuum, and so in the place of the Weeping Sap, it provided sun and moon and stars and warmth and wind.
Part of me hated to take down the tree. It was a good, living thing, even though it seemed a little vindictive in its sap slinging. I will miss it, for a while, and I feel guilty in interrupting its life. But I am reminded of something written by the author David James Duncan:
“…during the tree’s afterlife, its former hunger and yearning transmogrifies into the enduring structural integrity known as wood. Wood is a tree’s life history become something so solid we can hold it in our hands. This is not some lonely cry or mournful eulogy. Right here in the world where every living thing dies, a fallen tree’s integrity remains so literal that if a luthier ads strings to it, we can turn the departed tree’s sun yearning and thirst quenching into the sounds we call live music.”
I will add, that the life of the tree continues in what it leaves in its leaving. Sunlight and sky and new breezes. And perhaps a place where new trees will grow. I’m thinking something decidedly deciduous, and certainly not sappy.
Hope this finds you seeing the forest and the trees,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
Comments