Dendrophilia: The Dead
I keep a photo of a dead tree the way one keeps a photo of an old friend they don’t expect to ever see again but don’t want to forget.
The tree was dead when I first noticed it. It lay close to a path through a nearby park that I walked most days on my way to work. It was impossible to miss; its crown of unshed leaves made it appear as a large dark mass. I was struck by that crown. I kept an eye out for it for several days, which turned into a few weeks. Not one leaf ever fell. This during the fall season, when all of the living trees were shedding like crazy. I concluded that the shedding of leaves must be a process that can only be initiated by a living organism. Kept observing that dead tree as I walked past through the winter and spring. It remained as dark as ever.
A year or two later, I signed up for an online-only anxiety management course. The course came with its own little community space where members could make posts and leave comments. I posted about this tree, using my post as a combined “in memoriam” speech slash teaching on what it really means to let go. That letting go doesn’t mean you’re dying, it means you’re living. Responses to that post were the same generally positive mixture as I saw on everyone’s posts. I don’t know if anyone actually learned anything or cared.
The photo of the tree that I used in the post came from the time I first discovered it. The dead tree wasn’t the only notable tree in the park that particular day. Several feet before it, on the opposite side of the trail, there was a tree with plenty of still-green leaves. During fall. I took two photos that day: one of the dead tree, one of the living, and I sent them to an old professor from college to tell him about the symbolism of walking past these two trees nearly every day in both forward and reverse order. He was a Religious Studies professor. He understood and appreciated that. He taught about the spiritual significance of trees in his classes. They’re said to be connection points between the mundane and the divine, with their roots buried in the soil and their branches reaching toward the sky.
The dead ones that I see have neither.
The one in the park gets to rest in peace. The one that fell across a neighbor’s lawn wasn’t so lucky. It had stood in the center of that lawn, looking tall and strong as anything, until gale-force winds struck. The next morning, I saw it on a walk. Grass hung like old carpet, the layer of green growth plus the mat of soil held together by their roots, dangling off the elevated side of the upturned roots. I could knock it back and forth with my hands. A tiny little cave appeared to have opened in the ground. I’d never seen a real cave. (Still haven’t.) It was fascinating to look into. I climbed up onto the mostly-horizontal trunk and scooted along it. It was a great climbing platform.
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Three weeks later, grass carpet and cave and climbing platform were all gone. I don’t remember if anybody had a chance to notice that its leaves never fell.
When I was a child, a tree fell across the fence that separated my back yard from the back yard of a neighbor I played with. Crossing from my yard to hers always involved going to her front door and knocking and speaking to her parents and going through the house to its back door. Now we could cross freely. Well, I could; she never came to my yard, or my house, for that matter. I was always going over to hers because she had the better toys. We had fun climbing on the tree together. I fell, was unhurt, and learned that falling really isn’t very scary.
That tree was disposed of within a few weeks and the fence has stood intact ever since.
I keep the photo of the one that lasted on my phone and give thanks to the protection of the park. Dead trees have a long life ahead of them. Squirrels will scamper over their trunks and use their branches as feeding platforms. Fungi and bugs will have homes and food. The unfallen leaves teach lessons. I’m glad that the dead tree in the park gets to live out the full span of its life. For the ones that didn’t get that chance, I am sorry.
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