Mourning

I am sitting on my patio, watching two men in orange hard hats carve away the remainder of the tree next door. They have come with a saw blade that looks like a rototiller, and they are shredding the roots of the tree that has been in that spot for over thirty years.

Chips fly as bit by bit, the last vestiges of that beautiful tree are carved from the earth. Pieces of what I can only think of as its soul, its roots, its trunk are being raked unceremoniously into a grey trash can and dumped into the back of their big white truck.

A tree lives. It has life. It provides shelter, shade, oxygen, and beauty. It has something to offer the world. This tree's fatal sin was to have been planted by a stupid human too close to a home. For thirty years it has grown, thrived, and survived, only to be killed for the ease of the humans it has co-existed with for all this time.

I want to yell at these men who are only doing a job they were hired to do. They are not the murderers, they are merely the wet crew, come to finish cleaning the mess, rid us all of the offending sight of the tree that was killed. I want to yell anyway. Surely there is some other way. Why not a transplant? Probably too costly.

I am sad. Very sad.