Too Much Sky
The realization was slow. There was a tarp fluttering on the chimney of the house diagonal from mine. My first thought was, “oh that tarp is new.”
My second was “wait, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to see that chimney before.”
My third was “no. the tree is gone.”
I began to cry. A horrible sob that filled my whole body. I could not think straight, my brain short circuiting in grief. I could not find any distraction from the anger that filled me. I was home alone and alone with my sorrow. The tree was hundreds of years old, a huge oak that lived many lives inside my daydreams. As a kid, I sat on the swings in my backyard and sang to the tree. In my little head it embodied all of the magic of whimsical fantasy stories. A family of raccoons lived in the tree for years. I saw so many generations of baby raccoons from the windows of my house. Suddenly I could not bare to look out any windows at all. It must have been cut down while I was at work, a small mercy, because I do not believe I could have handled listening to the saw. Even now as I write this, I have noise canceling headphones on because another neighborhood tree is meeting its end. The death is a sound I cannot bare to listen to.
The loss of trees hits me hard in my neighborhood, because everything already feels so developed. Each tree feels precious and each time one is cut down, I am only reminded of so much I dislike about humanity. So easily humans separate themselves from nature, try to forget that we are a species from nature as well. I can only hope that the tree was very sick.
I have not been coping with loss well lately. I believe it to be the result of my body struggling to return to homeostasis. For some reason my allostatic load is too much right now and small things can easily tip me outside of homeostasis. At least thats what my therapist says.
I like history and books because they are complete stories. Even if we are constantly learning more nuance about the past, it is the past. It has already unfolded. I, like many of you, struggle a lot with the future. I have never been good at taking risks, always pushed by what I believe others want to see from me. It has left me not knowing what I want. I talked about this briefly during out magic potluck, but I feel more selfish as a 20-something year old than I ever did as a teenager. I feel so aware of the constrains of society and of the bars I’ve built in my own mind. How can I embrace the freedom I want my twenties to be, while also setting myself up for a comfortable future? It is so cliche, a near-quarter life crisis.
With teeth and love,
Michaela
p.s. in terms of literal teeth news, I spend so much time at the dentist I can walk down the hallway and wave to people in different treatment rooms. I've been going to my dentist since I was two years old and suddenly it has become one of the longest relationships in my life. It is a funny thing to treasure consistency despite the pain I have faced there.
Hi Michaela, this may not be of much comfort but there is currently a huge amount of research being done on urban greenspaces in the environmental field. The media tends to oversimplify many of our views on climate change; trees in cities are an especially hard and difficult topic to tackle. All this to say -- have faith that urban ecology is alive and well. There's a lot of bad, but also a lot of good -- I have never had a professor in environmental science that believed the world was beyond fixing. Every class I took approached climate issues with curiosity and positivity; it's always more complicated than you think. Don't give up! There is always hope. However, this doesn't detract from the fact that your tree is gone, and I'm sorry that such an important part of your childhood is no longer there.
ReplyDeleteMichaela, your last paragraph hit me HARD. Word for word how I have been feeling, especially "I like history and books because they are complete stories" and "I have never been good at taking risks, always pushed by what I believe others want to see from me." I have always struggled with that second part, especially because as I've gotten older I've become so adamant that I no longer function that way. It's humbling whenever I realize that I still do.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm very sorry to hear about your trees. It's deeply destabilizing to see the landscape of where you grew up change so drastically. I hope you are able to reminisce on your best memories with your neighborhood trees and that you can continue to connect with nature, big and small, in whatever settings you can. (Sometimes, when I'm on the bus to/from work, I like to count the number of squirrels or birds or geese that I see out the window. I try to keep the images in my mind long after I pass them and until I get home, just to remind myself that they're there. Today, on the way into work, I only saw 2 geese, and I was actually jealous of how restful they looked.) I know nothing can compare to your childhood tree, and it's hard to reckon with the fact that its loss represents a stark disconnect between humans and nature. But I also think your grief is hopeful in and of itself, because that means *you* recognize just how closely interlinked we are, and there must be others out there who do too.