I’m facing my large kitchen window that looks out into my front entrance and down the street. My view is a long stretch of road, with houses that look just like mine on either side. It is very windy, overcast, dreary. I imagine this is how the weather was on the day Jesus died. I live in a place deemed “the city of trees” and suddenly I notice just how many are ahead of me. One or two in front of every house, some extremely large, tall monsters that look like they have been here long before any of the residents.

That is….except for ours. Ours is a 1/2″ thick free stick from the local tree foundation. The beautiful white birch that used to be there, the one that I fell in love with when we bought this home, was unbeknownst to us very dead. After being approached by numerous tree trimming companies, coming to our door and asking if we want them to pull it out, we came to grips that my dream tree needed to be removed.

I instantly fought it, hoping that maybe in a year or so it would come back to life. Maybe we could put some iron in the ground, maybe the fertilizer we put on the grass was making it diseased and we could nurse it back to health. No, I was assured, the tall established beauty with the  tiny green leaves popping up everywhere was in fact….dead. But there was signs of life! What if we chopped it down just to see that it was green and alive inside?! No…the fresh leaves were giving false hope, they were not part of the tree, they were leeches sucking any drops of water from inside the decaying branches.

I relented. Husband got a chainsaw, and some friends, and slowly started chipping at the tree. I couldn’t watch. I knew it was years and years of growth being cut down in just moments. It would take years and years to ever see another tree like that one in my front yard again.

Our good friend the landscaper took one look at the tall but thin birch tree and told us it would take a few hours, if that, to tear the entire tree out, roots and all. But as we dug deeper and deeper, the roots were longer and thicker than anyone had imagined. The dead tree had infiltrated the entire front yard. The root system was complicated and even too much for the chainsaw. It took two full days to tear it out.

When the bulk of the tree was cut away, and all that was left was a stump…we saw the reality of the problem. There was no mistaking how decayed and tortured that tree actually was. The stump was hollow. It had been diseased for a very long time, the sickness focused on the very middle of the tree, weaving itself in and around the life giving roots, destroying the tree from the inside out. There would be no nursing it back to life, no salvaging any part of it, the entire stump, roots and the dirt around it…had to once and for all be torn out.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. The front yard was a mess, my husband was a mess, the ax was like a butter knife and the chainsaw went dull. We had to borrow a huge metal pole from our new neighbors just to get under the stump to maneuver it out.

When it was all done…we took a deep breath and stared. We never would have imagined it would take that many days, or that much sweat or that many saw blades to remove the dead tree. We thought it would be an easy job, and quick fix. The only quick thing about it was that the next day the remnants were swept away by the green waste company. All that was left was sawdust and bark chips.

Our front yard was a barren, hollow mess and we had nothing to fill the hole…

(come back tomorrow for part 2)

“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”                John 10:10

Tags: Jesus Loves You, Sacramento portrait photographer