UNSCHEDULED: tree

A tree fell and I heard it.

Back story: right before the pandemic, we moved from our teacher housing to go in on buying a building with two apartments with my father-in-law. He’s a great neighbor! The bonus of finding this little property was NOT that I got to share one bathroom with my beloved family of five, it was that it had this big momma tree in the back yard that was bigger than the house and became our living room and playroom. It was the key to our sanity during the pandemic when even the playgrounds were closed. We hung swings and trapezes and placed a hammock under it to watch the kids play under the bow of its branches.

Momma tree in the yard. Photo by Raina Mast, 2019. (Photoshop used for child privacy)

But in the fall of 2022 (no foreshadowing pun intended), we had some rainy days, and then a few really hot days, and our thirsty old Italian pine sucked up too much water at once and the next morning at around 7:45, it split itself in half from the weight of its branches. At least that was the arborist’s theory.

I was leaving for work when I heard the loud pop. How weird to remember sound. (Try it, it’s a fun meditation if you need to procrastinate or calm down— think of the way the last time you heard a dog bark or how people sang happy birthday to you or your first concert. I’m a visual thinker so maybe remembering sound is harder for me. People say you don’t remember the pain of labor once the baby is out, but that’s another weird thing I can remember if I think really hard. Please comment on this if you have thoughts! I’m curious how other people remember their senses).

Anyway, when I heard the pop, I just thought someone had slammed down a dumpster down the block. I actually left for work through the yard and did not see the tree had fallen because I was reading an email on my phone. So I didn’t know what the sound was until Andy called me and said, “Did you see the tree fell?” I cried a lot over the following days. I probably looked crazy to my art teacher coworkers as we talked about our new Wabi Sabi book and I fought back tears in reading, “Wabi sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” (Koren, page 7)

The tree had such a presence in our lives and there was no saving it. It was just a giant mess to clean up.

Tree on Trampoline, September, 2022.

It was very sad. And expensive. Insurance companies don’t see value in trees like a bike being stolen or a fire burning a cabinet or even the stuff a tree breaks. Oddly, half of the tree landed on the trampoline, which not only bounced back after the tree was gone, but also kept the weight of the tree hovering from breaking the old fence. So home insurance covered nothing. My spouse is as cheap as me so we ended up deciding we’d pay for its removal just to the stump, saving money by convincing ourselves that removing the stump ourselves would be no big deal if we had to do it. We tried to live with it, but it was taking up the whole corner of our small yard and limiting what the heck we could do: put a table over it?

Removing a stump is no fun. Outside the city, I hear you can burn it out. We pondered how long mushrooms would take to eat away at it. We regretted just not coughing up more money for the arborist to use a big drill thing. Yes, we did save money, but were in for a very rude awakening… and a lovely showing up of neighbors to support Andy in one of his most romantic gestures in our 10 year relationship.

While I was away for ten days for the trip of my life in Argentina, Andy dropped everything to not only take care of the kids, but dig down 6 feet deep and 15 feet around the stump and sap root. It was like a whole upside down tree under there.

Our neighbor Will is a contractor who does everything AND is a wonderful friend; the type of guy that goes out in a giant rainstorm and makes sure every neighbor’s drain is unclogged of debris. He reminds me so much of my ironworker grandfather whose hands were always jacked up from working with them all day. So Will came and hacked out the roots with a little saw one log at a time. Amy, Will’s wife jumped in to get swole lifting logs and helping get the sand out the way. Little by little, they chunked away at the stump.

To say it was moving to be half way around the world and receive those text messages of them happily working so hard is an understatement. Up until that point, the pottery studio felt like a pipe dream, something so far off because I thought I’d be watching mushrooms for two years before I could even think about laying concrete. It’s not that I was putting my dreams on hold, it just felt undoable, unaffordable, unnecessary. My old roomie Catherine would point to my “only-the-potatoes” life philosophy to blame. I am a busy minimalist who does not like fusses to be made. I don’t think I do it in an annoying martyr way, more of like an annoying “I’m seriously fine with my life the way it is” risk-averse and maybe lazy sort of way. And I am good at visualizing big ideas and coming up with 10,000 possible solutions, but I have major trouble making final decisions and pulling the trigger to start big things. So to have my partner set it all in motion was a huge weight lifted, a gift of opening a giant door to my future. We don’t gush feelings for each other, but I hope he knows how life-changing that damn stump removal was. It set it all in motion.

Once that inertia took hold, the project flowed quite quickly. Will is a fabulous contractor who set me up with doable questions to obsess over and get back to him so he could go to his next step. In ADHD support, there is something called body doubling where you are more productive if you have someone there to even just watch, like when happens when kids get more homework done if they sit down at a table together while parents cook. Or when you try to record music by yourself vs. when someone else is there when you press record. Will not only offered skills as my contractor, he cared about my dream and got a kick out of solving the many problems I created. Our chit chats and sit down sketches with two pencils created amazing accountability and a drive to keep chipping away quickly at the project. It wasn’t because we were on a tight schedule— this thing could be built as fast or as slow as we were willing to push it— it was the happiness along the way of checking things off together. The camaraderie really kept me focused on completing the tedious tasks along the way and the home studio was built way faster than I would have guessed. I’d still be watching mushrooms eat a stump if I only had myself making decisions around here. I don’t think I would have ever invested in myself like that if I were alone, which is sad in a way. Sort of like how I took so much better care of my body when there was a fetus to worry about in there. I’ll admit that there’s a huge part of me that imagines I’d be chasing art dreams more if I didn’t have my family filling up my life. But I don’t think I’d have my studio or even my wheel if it weren’t for being partnered up with someone who wants to share the busy parent life and back my ambitions. Maybe my family actually makes me pursue my art more in those quick moments in-between all the responsibilities and QT. I may not be making as much art as a single lady, but the art I do make means a lot to me.

I’ll make a separate post of the actually steps we took to get the pottery shed built.