The hail woke me. Outside my bedroom window, I heard the sudden rapping of the ice pellets against my roof, and beneath that, the wind, the rain. My four year old, who had crawled into bed with my wife and me sometime in the night, whimpered and pulled the blanket tighter around him. I lifted the curtain and peeked out — still all dark except for the sodium lights. I shut the window, cuddled my child, and went back to sleep.
I did not wake up again until my alarm went off, after my wife had already gone to work. I woke up to a text from her: “Looks like the wind last night took another piece off Friend Tree.”
The maple tree, ravaged by storms, 2026. [E. Scott]
After I dressed the child and fed the cats, I stepped out on the back porch and surveyed the scene. A long arm had cracked off the main trunk of the maple tree, smashing through the privacy fence between our house and our neighbor’s, its dozens of leafy limbs stretching all the way across our neighbor’s yard and partially into the yard beyond that.
I let out a long, grieving sigh. Less than a month before, on the day after Palm Sunday, the tree had cracked in the other direction, dropping an arm across my yard and taking out a section of fence on the other side. Neither limb had landed on anybody’s house, but it had only been two years since the tree had dropped yet another limb that had required us to get a new roof. There were only two main limbs left now, one of them poised directly over my neighbor’s roof.
We had been avoiding the inevitable for years, but it was clear: Friend Tree’s time was at an end.
The silver maple tree in 2020, adorned with Beltane ribbons [E. Scott]
Six years ago, during our first coronavirus Beltane, I wrote about my wife and I moving into this house in Belleville, and how we had fallen in love with this silver maple. Here’s what I wrote, then:
…we were looking for a house that we might remain in for a long time, perhaps forever, and by that point in our search, we were sick of looking at houses, sick of making judgments on whether or not to keep a given property on our list, sick of setting our hearts on a place based on the pictures and walking in to find the roof collapsing or the plumbing missing. But we found this house with the maple tree in the back yard, and we had the same reaction: this was a tree, we thought, that we might grow old with.
We were alone at Beltane, but we strung the maple tree with ribbons and danced it like a maypole nevertheless; we offered it the chalice of wine and a handful of corn muffins. We spoke to the landwight that was within and was the tree, asked for its friendship and partnership. And though trees are silent, I like to think it heard our offer and accepted.
Friends warned us not to get so attached. “Maples will run their roots through your sewer lines,” they warned, “and they’ll drop branches through your roof.” I suppose they proved themselves right. After the first big branch dropped, we discovered that there was a spot in the trunk where the heartwood had turned to mulch, and that weakened core could no longer hold up the cosmos of leaves that had towered over us when we moved in. But still, I mourned the tree. When I called the tree service to clean up what had fallen and take down the last two limbs, it felt just the same as calling the vet to put a beloved pet to sleep. It felt necessary and awful, something that had to be done, and still a betrayal.
We call the maple Friend Tree because that is what he is: our friend, someone we gave offerings of mead and bread. I set a concrete statue of Pan at his roots, and some nights I would stand outside with Pan and Friend Tree and talk about our lives together. To me, he had a personality, an avuncular majesty that watched over our home and family.
If someone had ever asked me if I thought of myself as an animist, I’m sure I would have said yes. I was raised Pagan, brought up to believe in a god-filled world, some of whom were as big as the night sky and some as small as a fish or a groundhog. When I added Heathenry to my practice, I learned the vocabulary of the landvættir, that particular way of conceptualizing the spirits of a landscape. But despite all that knowledge, I don’t know if I really understood that commitment until I bonded with Friend Tree, and didn’t really confront its implications until his time was at an end.
As an animist, I feel pulled in two directions. On the one hand, I recognize that landwights, as plants and animals and rocks, are part of the great wheel of being. When a tree dies, it becomes home to all manner of new life, rotting until it becomes the soil itself, the setting for new trees to sprout, grow, and die in turn.
“Friend Tree isn’t dead,” my wife says. “He’s only changing.” But on the other hand, I can’t help it — he is not just a tree, but one particular tree, one I love in the way I would love a person. I can’t help but feel as though I could have done more for him, although logically I understand that we haven’t lived here long enough to have made much of a difference in his health.
On Friday, the tree service came, bringing out their Bobcat and cherry-picker so they could reach high into the tree’s canopy and cut the limbs down. As they were setting up, I walked up to the tree and hugged him, the way I had hugged him the day we moved in.
“I’m sorry, old guy,” I told him. “I love you.”
I hope that he understood.
The maple tree after the tree service, 2026. [E. Scott]
Yesterday, at my coven’s Beltane celebration, we planted a new tree in the yard on the opposite side from Friend Tree. My wife brought it home from a nursery that specializes in plants native to our region in the Mississippi River Valley – a Basswood tree, also called an American Linden. If things go well, perhaps it will grow tall enough to shade us before my child leaves home.
My covenmate the horticulturalist called us all over as we put the new tree in the ground. “Tickle the roots!” she demanded, and everyone laughed and came over, wiggling the rootbound earth until she judged the tree would be free to take hold in our yard. Then I poured it an offering of red wine and scattered a crumbled strawberry muffin around its base, and kissed one of its new, green leaves.
I don’t know if the linden tree will take root in our yard, or if one of the dozens of volunteer maple saplings scattered through our yard will one day grow to rival our friend. But I hope to my landwights that they will. I still want a tree that I can grow old with.
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