Obituary

I started an entry for this long neglected blog yesterday. We are on Spring Break - and for once it is actually spring. I had intended to go on about how around here spring is the really windy season. Every season is a windy season, but spring is really special in that department, but I started with another sign of spring.

Our next-door neighbor's globe willow - sometimes called a desert willow - had started to green out. It is a wonderful sight - all those delicate skyward twigs start to change shade from decidedly gray to a vaguely gray-green then to a soft pale green then the entire crown of the tree seems to be shrouded by a pale green mist. I have watched the transformation for the nineteen springs that we have lived in this house.

I have photographed this tree in winter when it was dressed out in one of our rare snows. It has always seemed to me to have a particularly solid but graceful trunk dividing ever upward to the fine willow twigs at the top. Desert willows reach up, rather than drooping down like the willows I knew in the south.

Yesterday I was out and smiled at the tree as I saw the shade of the green mist deepening.

Today our neighbor took a chainsaw and killed it. First he took off the branches reaching up with their mist of green, then the outward reaching branches that supported the snow in winter. Last time I could stand to look, there was only a mutilated trunk standing there.

I'm sure he had a reason. I hope it was a good one. I hope it was not just to eliminate the shade that prevented the foreign grass from growing uniformly across their yard.

I have spent much of my life in desert places. Don't get me wrong, I love the desert and all its intensity and subtlety. But maybe all of my years with the desert have made me consider a tree one of the miracles of creation, and I shall mourn the passing of this one.