Ashen Hope

Happy New Year!

Click HERE to listen to the Podcast version on Spotify instead.

Click HERE to listen to the Podcast version on SoundCloud instead.

 

Today, I’m going to tell you a story, a true tree tale I call “Ashen Hope.”  At the end of it, I’m going to ask you what lesson you learn from it.  Ready?

 

We looked at the house in late spring.  It was perfect.  Oh, it had way too much wallpaper and needed to be updated, but the layout was perfect.  It was in the right school zone.  And the price point was right where we needed it to be.

 

We didn’t expect it to be perfect.  The pictures on the listing were, frankly, poor.  You couldn’t see the space, just walls.  The gentle slope of the backyard looked like a steep hill.  It didn’t look great in photos.  But in person, it was perfect.

 

As we walked through the house, I lingered on the main level a little longer, and my wife and the realtor went upstairs to see the bedrooms.  When I came upstairs a minute later, my wife was exiting the gigantic master bedroom walk-in closet with a tear glistening in her eye.  “This is the one,” she said.  True story.

 

The house was a short sale, and the sellers owed two lenders, so we knew we’d have to wait a long time to hear an answer.  The realtor told us they had rejected higher offers than ours in the past, but you never know.  Sometimes it’s just about the timing.

 

The front yard had three beautiful redbud trees that are stunning in the spring.  (I’ve written about my redbud trees before.)  The backyard had a maple tree, or rather a cluster of four maple trees that grew out of the same spot.  I’ve never been sure if I should consider it to be one tree or four.  There was also another tree in the backyard outside the big, beautiful living room windows.  This tree was dead.  It was late April, or was it the beginning of May?  At any rate, the tree had no leaves.  It stood there, naked and sad, the only flaw on the property (besides all the wallpaper inside).

 

“If we get this house, I’ll have to cut that tree down,” I thought.  I figured I could get some friends from church to help.  Surely someone had a chainsaw.  I hoped someone knew how to do this.  I didn’t have a clue.  I rely on my friends a lot.

 

We received an answer sooner than we expected.  Our offer was accepted!  We took possession mid-June.  We carried the furniture in, started unpacking boxes, and began scraping wallpaper.  And the view out of our living room windows was beautiful.  You see, the tree I thought was dead was very much alive.

 

I learned that it leafs out very late in the spring every year, though that year it was later than normal.  I also learned from a friend that it is an Ash tree.

 

“Oh neat,” I replied, happy to have learned something.

 

“Yeah, you’re probably gonna have to cut it down,” came the reply.

 

“Why?”  Because of the emerald ash borer.  A bug that eats trees.  It was destroying trees all across the country.  Many people cut down their ash trees before any sign of infestation so that they could plant different trees.  And that’s what was suggested to me.

 

I never understood that.  The fear of losing a tree should encourage me to cut down the tree?  I suppose that might make sense in certain contexts, but not mine.  It didn’t make any sense to me at all.  I decided to let the tree be and see what the future would hold.

 

The tree continued to grow, and in a few years its branches even reached over the corner of our deck.  We had replaced the red decking boards with a nice low maintenance composite decking.  To this day the deck is one of my favorite places to sit and relax and think.  I remember very distinctly one day a few years ago, on a particularly warm day at the end of May, thinking how nice it was that the Ash tree was giving shade to part of the deck.  I sat in its shade, and thanked God for the blessing.

 

I remember that moment distinctly because within a week, that shade over my deck was gone.  On the first weekend of June, a microburst hit our town early in the morning.  There was no siren.  There was no warning.  We woke to wind as loud as a freight train.  We grabbed the kids and headed to the basement.  When all was calm, I emerged and looked around outside.  In the darkness of predawn, it was hard to make sense of what I was seeing.  Trees, but not where they should be.

 

One trunk of the maple tree had cracked at the base and crashed onto our playset.  The sturdy playset was badly damaged, but held up, and stopped the tree from hitting the house.  And the Ash tree was now split in half.  The half that provided shade for the deck was now crashed onto the fence, thankfully having just missed the deck and house.

 

Thankfully, my friends had chainsaws.  They helped clean up my fallen trees and limbs, and also my neighbor’s tree that crashed through the fence into my yard.  At church, members showed up and cleaned up what had fallen there.  Three large sections from a couple weak Bradford Pears had been laid down by the wind very neatly side by side across the breadth of the parking lot.  For days the rough roar of saws was heard all around the city.

 

I wondered about what to do with the part of my Ash tree that was still standing.  It had suffered some stress.  On the windward side there were horizontal splits in the bark of some of the limbs, a sign that they had bent back so far they nearly snapped.  The leeward side was where the insides of the tree were exposed, and not like a neat chainsaw cut, clean and perpendicular through a limb.  But a nasty split that was a fairly large.  The long exposed section was rough and vulnerable.

 

Would it survive?  I wondered out loud to a friend if I could put a sealant on the exposed wound to protect it from insects, disease, and excessive evaporation.  “Uh… You’re probably going to have to cut it down; I don’t think he’s going to make it,” came the reply.

 

I wasn’t ready to give up on it just yet, though.  I decided wait and look for signs of failure.

I bought a tree sealant and treated the wound.  Then I waited.  There was no sign of failure or even of distress.

 

The mature roots knew what to do.  They soaked up the nutrients and fed the still-standing half.  All the life that would have gone to the missing half was transformed into power for new growth.  Sprouts popped up all along that side of the tree.  I trimmed the ones that were too low, and watched in amazement as the sprouts became branches, and the branches became limbs within a year.  The new growth hid the ugly wound from sight, the wound that is now healed, toughened, and weathered.  A valiant scar that says, “I’m still alive.  I’m still here.  I’m still growing.”

 

It’s been only a few years, but the tree no longer appears to be a half-ash tree.  It is full, vibrant green, and lively.  Two goldfinches like to perch in the top.  A downy visits the suet feeder.  A rectangular platform swing hangs from a sturdy limb, and my children sometimes swing on it, sometimes read books on it.  The grass around it thrives in the shelter of the leaves, even in the heat of summer

 

And one, new branch is slowly creeping its way to just the right spot above the deck.  I didn’t curse when the wind took the shade from me, as Jonah cursed when the worm took the plant that was shielding him from the sun.  But I will certainly be glad to have that bit of shade back again.

 

What’s the moral of the story?  The lesson of this true tree tale?

 

I have an opinion.  But, well, what do you think?

truth + love