In late April, I wrote about our elm tree, a full-grown, broad-canopied tree, which before it became diseased had been a gathering place for family, friends, and a motley array of dogs, birds, deer, cats, squirrels, wild turkeys, and chickens.

Now it’s early June. The tree is gone; there’s a five-foot mountain of its wood chips under our spruce and a three-foot mound of fine-ground stump mulch by the back fence at the edge of the garden. The trunk and big limbs of the elm are jumbled in shoulder-high piles under the cherry and chestnut trees, and the tree cutter’s machinery left the yard brown and rutted. The little hillock where the wide trunk of the elm had met the ground, now spreads four, long, barren arms in the four directions, following what had been the tree’s major roots. This scattered wreckage of tree adds up to a devastated backyard, but I find it beautiful, and I feel protective, possessive of this static chaos.  

I grew up doing manual labor, farm work. After I left home, I exchanged that labor for writing and editing. This means the work of the tree is both old and new to me, and it’s given me a gift. Writer Chuck Palahniuk explains: “I’m not sure how it happens, but manual labor leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.”

Both the tree and I have been transformed: the tree to the useful forms of logs, chips, and mulch, and I to a woman returned to manual labor. I feel a protective sense. I want to take care of of the tree myself, to keep as much as I can of its transformed forms in our yard, or at least in our neighborhood.

Every day I shovel a few loads of the giant pile of wood chips/ mulch into the wheelbarrow and cart them to the parking strip as ground cover around the juniper bushes.  I’ve walked around the neighbors to offer wood and chips for the taking, I’ve planted drought-resistance flowers on the little hillock atop the stump and will soon plant native grasses there as well. I’ve loaded a big stump for a neighbor’s chopping block, and once the wood is cut, I’ll stack cords of it along the fence. Someday, when cold weather sets in and all my family is coming home, I’ll carry the wood to our fireplace and start a fire in anticipation of seeing people I love.

Cutting a diseased tree is a seemingly unimportant moment, but I’ve discovered this loss unfolds and enters every part of my life, like any felt loss would. This tree, once alive, thriving, and a great joy, has in its altered state, altered me. It has adjusted my sight, literally and figuratively. I can now see across the river valley; can now enjoy the giant elm of our neighbor, as if that elm I never noticed before had stepped in to offer itself for our loss. The figurative part of this new sight is that the jumbled piles of tree trunk, big limbs, and the mountain of chips and mulch have given me some of the gifts of insight that accompany labor, gifts that dovetail with my work as a writer.  

Shovel-full by shovel-full, log by log as I work, think, and take stock, I revisit hot summers baling hay; sweaty, itchy days scooping oats; the parched throat one feels after hours of cutting volunteer corn out of bean fields. In memory or in the present, I let my mind wander over my most recent book; hone in on spots in the book I want to expand; imagine new characters I want to create; and sometimes, am visited by little epiphanies.

Writer Chang-rae Lee, author of On Such a Full Sea, says: “…maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks… when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?”

The elm was the center of decades of stories while it was alive, stories of humans, birds, cats, dogs, wild turkeys, stories of wind and rain, snow and sun so hot trees’ leaves curled. Some of those stories became my own when I moved onto the tree’s land. Now the elm has been shattered, but it’s come back. I’m telling its stories, and thanks to the freedom labor gives me, am rejuvenated in making more of my own.