When the tree fell on our house last winter, it could have been far worse. We were in the kitchen when we heard and felt a sudden booming thud. That frozen moment: what the hell was that — but we’re fine. Next moment: rushing to the adjoining den to see one of our two white spruces up against the windows but the room intact. Then upstairs to see if there was a hole in the roof — there wasn’t. The enormous maple behind the house had broken the 100-foot spruce’s fall, more or less snapping it in two so that the upper part didn’t come down perpendicular to the roof. The tree guys, who arrived within a couple of hours, seemed genuinely stunned at our luck. Not even a shattered window, just some relatively minor roof damage. Despite a rough winter with many episodes of high wind, as on that day, four months later a spruce relic is still lodged in the maple’s upper branches.
We’re approaching the 25th anniversary of moving into this house. In that time, we’ve lost six and a half mature trees to storms, tree aging, and the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle. The half came from a twin-trunked, towering silver maple, the victim of as violent a summer thunderstorm as I can remember. It so happened that we were an hour and a half away, visiting our son at music camp, when that storm hit, and we’d left the 15-year-old home alone. The morning after, an Ozymandian wreck lay across the backyard. “You must have felt the earth shake,” we said to our son. He shrugged.
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