I sat down to work this morning, as usual, but I got derailed, when for the last time, I looked out the window at our elm. Today everything will change. The tree cutters have come.

We have a big elm in our back yard. A full-grown, wide canopied tree, it’s provided shade for the house, cover for our kids at play, cool comfort for a summer afternoon’s reading, shelter from the high sun for outdoor meals with friends and family. Over a decade ago, my brother climbed high into the elm to anchor the parachutes, shade for the hundreds of guests at our oldest son’s Bar Mitzvah celebration.

The limb of the elm is where we hung the bird bath and feeder for the thousands of chickadees, lazuli buntings, flickers, red polls, and magpies that come to us. Deer have gathered at midnight and early morning to tap that bird feeder with their noses and eat the seed that trickles to the grass.

I’ve laughed watching a squirrel hurtle itself toward the spruce from the higher branches of this elm, but miss, and fall twenty feet to the ground, shake its head and dash away, embarrassed. One winter afternoon, I came home early to see sixteen deer gathered under the tree. Two of them got into a fight. They reared on their hind legs, striking out with their hard little fore-hooves and making a strange squealing sound.

Another winter day, in the yard by the tree, I watched my 8-year-old son approach a pregnant deer, carefully, slowly pulling the pockets of his jeans inside out. When he came in, I asked, “What were you saying to them?” He answered, “I told them I didn’t have any weapons, that they didn’t need to be afraid.” Another day, a Sunday in May, thirteen wild turkeys squatted like boulders on our elm’s high limbs and stayed with us the whole day.  

For many late-spring weeks after our son died, it was this tree that shaded me while I lay in the grass, trying to refute a truth I could not admit was true. 

This elm is the one that stood near the pergola my sons and husband built to surprise me.  Our weekly Torah study met under this tree, and grandchildren have played under this tree. Before he emigrated, my son fashioned a heart in the grass under this tree, a heart we’ve never cut in the years since. Neighbor dogs have zoomed through our yard, circled the elm, and chased each other out again. A black and white cat has crouched in the grass under the elm, sprung to catch a bird, and then let it go.

An accumulation of moments over time ties our lives to a place, to things. By the waving of its branches, by the generous way this tree welcomed others, shared its limbs and shade, and made its windfull sound at night, this elm has graced my chaotic, joyous, maniacal, grief-stricken, and peaceful life. It made a camaraderie among species in a way that made me more whole.

But today the tree cutters have come and the loss is difficult. Each thick limb that falls to the ground shakes the earth with a heavy thud, a punch in the stomach. The sound of a buzz saw cuts air, so unlike the sound of the soft night wind through the limbs of the elm that brings us sleep.