Goodbye to an Old Friend

It was a dark and stormy night . . . 

Well actually it was just a stormy morning, back on June 3rd of this year, w hen we experienced wind gust up to 50 miles per hour, with Cliff Maas, on his weather blog calling it more like a November morning. Combined with wet soils, due to substantial rainfall at the time, numerous trees around the city came down. 

One tree that did not survive was a native Bigleaf Maple, on the corner of 44th and Burke Avenues, belonging to Wallingford residents Mary Pembroke Perlin and her husband David. Mary originally announced the loss of their tree on their neighborhood google group, and I recently had a chance to sit down with both of them to discuss the rather dramatic end of an old family friend. 

At 7:45 on that morning, the Perlins heard a loud bang, as branches from their maple broke off and crashed onto the top of their car. So loud was the noise, that not just the Perlins, but construction workers from the nearby site at 45th and Burke Avenues came running. Two sections of the tree had snapped off mid-way up the trunks, and the construction workers graciously jumped in to assist the Perlins in removing what debris they could from the street. At one point the guys even used their own chainsaw to cut the branches into smaller, more manageable sizes.  

But it wasn’t until three different arborists were able to inspect the tree, that week, that the extent of damage and underlying health of tree was revealed. The tree experts showed the Perlins that a massive fissure that had opened up inside one of the three trunks, indicating that long-standing disease had been eating away at it. The unanimous prognosis: the tree was at risk of structural failure. The Perlin’s were grateful that only their car was damaged, and not a young person, walking by, on their way to nearby Lincoln High School. Over the years, they had gone to great lengths to try and prevent this type of damage, including hiring a tree service to reinforce the branches with kevlar cables. The goal had been to hold the branches more compactly, together, and prevent the top-heavy branches from acting like a wind sail. 

So, after much calling around, the Perlin’s were able to find a tree service with a crane to take down the tree, piece by piece that Saturday. No easy task, given the amount of tree damage throughout the city. A tree this size generates a substantial amount of cut-wood. Most of it was hauled away by the tree service, but they kept a few pieces that Mary hopes to have a local wood turner create bowls with as mementos.  

After interviewing the Perlins, I sensed that the tree had generated many memories for both their family and the neighborhood. In her google group posting, Mary recalled how the tree provided shade over the windows in the nursery when she brought her first son home from the hospital, “as we rocked those summer days away, sunlight poured through the leaves throwing little bits of gold around the room. His hands reached out to grasp the light that fell into our laps.” The maple also provided much appreciated shade for family parties on their deck, as the late afternoon sun can feel the most intense.  With the loss of that amount of shade, the Perlins noted that it has dramatically changed the growing conditions for their existing garden plants, and opens up possibilities for what they could plant in the future. 

For the neighborhood, the maple had become somewhat of a shrine over the last few years. At the very base of the tree trunk is a hollow that faces the sidewalk. Neighbors and passersby began to place fanciful objects and trinkets, creating a sense of anticipation as to what they would find next. One day a young girl was heard to exclaim “Let’s see if there is anything in the Tree of Wonder!” And that’s what the tree was thought of after that. Folks sometimes left toy figurines, some of them quite clever, including one left after the 2017 Women’s March, or a miniature hard-bound book that Mary imagined was right-sized for a squirrel to read. The Perlins for now have opted to keep a portion of the remaining tree trunk standing, allowing the tradition of quirkiness to continue. However, the family did recently have to close the hollow for business, on account of the discovery of a bee nest this week. One way or another, this tree will continue to provide a home!