Remembering the Maples

A few weeks ago I was walking through the Botanical Gardens when I found the perfect leaf to press into my journal. It was a large maple leaf, still green. As I ran my fingers gently over its veins, I thought about the two sugar maples that stood in my backyard growing up.

They were magical. Grand, statuesque trees that belonged on the pages of Anne of Green Gables or John Muir’s nature writings.

For hundreds of years, their thick branches begot more branches that looked like giant arms gesturing up toward the sky. They held dense bunches of leaves. The leaves of sugar maples have five lobes with U-shaped spaces in between. A million glints of light entered through those spaces, creating feathery sky-beds of green and gold or green and white, depending on the time of day. The trees provided my family with a shady yard in the summer, then bountiful crisp leaves for gathering into piles in the fall. I knew these trees well; they were an unmoving part of home. I took their sturdy presence for granted.

When I was ten, my parents told me that some people were going to come and cut them down. I felt a pit in my stomach when my dad explained that trees can get sick just like people, and our trees were very, very sick. They were dying from the inside out. You would never know; their leaves were so perfectly green, so spirited when they rustled in the wind.

I wish I could say I spent the following days outside under the trees, enjoying them while I could. In reality, I spent most of my free time in my room. I stared at the trees through my window sentimentally. I used a sharpie to draw one onto a white cami-top to memorialize it. I wrote in my journal and cried a little bit. I mourned that something I had taken for granted could go away with such little notice. I loved those old maples more than I knew.

It wasn’t long before I watched men high up in the trees cutting them down carefully. Branch by branch the trees disappeared in a slow goodbye. I filled a tupperware with sawed-down wood, ashes of what used to be. I found it comforting to open it up and inhale the earthy, sweet scent I was so familiar with.

Thirteen years later, I still go back to that tupperware of musty wood chips now and then. And when I see a maple tree, I remember my tall, ancient friends. I am transported back to a time in my childhood when I suddenly and effortlessly experienced an attachment to nature.