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From: Justin Hushka
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 6:10 PM
To: Elsa Dorfman; Harvey Silverglate
Cc: Geoff Price
Subject: Re: grill in front of 601

Elsa/Harvey,

Not sure if you can tell from that side of the building, but I just looked out the window and it appears that the large tree on our side has fallen over in the storm!?! Luckily it looks like it just missed their house and hopefully nobody was hurt. I'm guessing they've already called someone, but just wanted to make sure you were aware of the situation. What a shame...it was such a great tree.

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An email from our new tenant!!! Six oclock on a summer week day. The assumption that of course we wd be at our computers. No cell fone. No land fone. Too dangerous to run outside yelling. Correct of course abt the computers. This is how we found out that the sixty foot, eighty year old sugar maple tree in our backyard had been whipsawed by gale winds and come crashing down from its base or had been hit by lightening. Either way, the tree was down. Inside, abt twenty yards away I didn't hear a thing, mostly because the rain and thunder were so loud.

No surprise that people write abt their favorite tree falling down. Leaving a big hole in the ground. I took that tree for granted. It was part of what I love abt our house. We have only three trees and that was the only one whose leaves changed color. It never occurred to me that this big healthy tree wd be gone all at once. No slow dying.

Everyone took pictures of the downed tree. How it rested on the old old chain link fence, lurching the fence's concrete support out of the ground, just like its own roots had erupted from the ground. It spread its crown across two neighbors yards, fitting almost neatly in a six yard space where it cd do little damage. It rested right by a neighbor's yellow door. Everyone marveled that no one was hurt. No one was walking on the neighbors deck where it fell. Our neighborle. The scale of all the bushes and clumps of shade plants. Now what to do? A chain tree? Another lilac. A cone hydrangea? I cdnt face another sugar maple. I cdnt buy a twenty foot tree and I cdnt bear to think of a sapling slowly growing when I didn't have twenty more years. Planting a young tree took nerve I didn't have.

Happily the chain link fence can be replaced w/ an equally old segment. It crosses my mind to leave the fallen section. It is graceful. Slumped, not crumbled. Covered w/ wisteria and sweetpea vines. Honeysuckle. Will Jarvis our neighbors dog be inspired to run away? Does he need, by now, a serious fence still?

Postscript. I went to a show at Mass Moca and saw wonderful turbine tree by Joseph Smolinski. I fell in love w/ it. It wd be perfect.

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