Our Elm Tree

In the summers of my Western North Carolina childhood, my older brother Steve and the neighborhood boys played baseball in our side field.

At the upper end of the field stood a stately American elm tree. While the boys played, I leaned against the broad trunk under a lush, leafy canopy and watched the game. I spent many summer days in the shelter of that elm.

The elm was a short distance from our back door. For several years, we had a picnic table that sat beneath the elm. It shaded our family cookouts from the sun.

I took the elm for granted, as one does with something so familiar. Because of its size, it was hard to ignore. When we came up our street, heading home, we saw the rounded crown of the tree before our house came into view. As I grew older and visited my parents, driving up the street and recognizing the tree reaching to the sky, I began to worry about the health of the elm. I remembered how lightning had once struck an apple tree in our backyard. My mother and I were sitting at the dining room table when we heard the crack of lightning and the thud of the tree as it hit the ground.

One day around 2010, I stood in the side yard near the elm with my mother, who was a widow then and living alone. “Maybe we should get the elm tree cut down,” I said. “It’s awfully close to the house.”

“I’m sentimental about that tree,” she said. “It was here when we moved to this house in 1957.”

“I was a baby then,” I reflected, thinking how long ago that had been. “I’m sentimental about it, too,” I said. “But I’m afraid it’s going to fall someday. I think it has a disease.” I pointed to a pale gray blaze that ran up its thick, furrowed trunk.

I could see my mother didn’t want to discuss losing the tree.

“We’ll wait a while,” I said. My worrying didn’t stop, though. One night I lay in bed during a thunderstorm and listened to the pounding rain. I could imagine the elm’s roots losing their grip in the muddy earth and the tree crashing into my mother’s house, taking down her back porch and caving in the bedroom where she slept.

The next day, I said, “I really think we need to get the elm tree cut down.”

To my surprise, she said, “I guess so.”

When the tree service workers came, I watched as the young men climbed onto the tree limbs and started sawing branches. After a few minutes, I went back into the house and told my mother, “That’s kind of hard to watch.”

“I know,” she said.

Later that afternoon, she and I were in the kitchen when we heard the shrill sound of a chain saw and then a boom.

“I hope they didn’t let it hit anything,” she said, worrying about the porch and an outbuilding that stood nearby.

I rushed out to find stagnant water dripping down the white porch rails and a muddy splash on the side of the white outbuilding.

The older supervisor saw my face as I looked at the mess, and he said, “That trunk had stump-water in it. I was afraid it would.”

“Was the tree rotten?” I asked.

“Well, it had rot in it,” he said. “That’s an old tree. We can come back another day and get rid of the stump.”

But mother decided she wanted to keep the stump. At least she’d still have something of the tree.

“We can plant a pot of flowers on top of it,” she said.

And that’s what I did. I nailed a large flower pot to the stump’s flat surface and filled it with marigolds and petunias. Each spring after that, as long as my mother lived, I planted flowers there.

These days, as spring approaches and tree branches begin to bud, I reminisce about many things in my childhood that are gone now, including the elm tree that watched over my family, offering us its shelter.