Eventually the storm moved on. The roaring softened to ordinary wind. The electricity returned. With my Man breathing steadily beside me and the world no longer trying to tear itself apart, I finally slept.
The next morning he made coffee.
Of course he did.
Apparently even natural disasters must wait until after coffee.
We went outside together. The house was fine. My Man inspected the roof, windows, siding, and everything else humans apparently must examine after the sky tries to kill them.
"No damage to the house, Bear," he said with relief.
I was looking at the tree.
My tree lay across the yard in a confusion of limbs and leaves. The canopy that had once been above me was now at eye level.
I walked around it slowly. I smelled the freshly broken wood. I sniffed branches I had previously known only from below.
There were no squirrels.
Cowards.
My Man stood beside the broken trunk, drinking his coffee. Then he made a few more comments about all the projects he had intended to accomplish that weekend.
I looked at the tree.
He looked at his list.
We were experiencing the tragedy differently.
Then he put down his coffee and went to work.
For two days, the oak became his project. He cut away the branches, dragged them into piles, carried them away, returned, cut more, and stacked more.
Slowly, the great green wreckage disappeared.
I followed him for part of it and supervised from a safe distance for another part. I also took several naps because grief is exhausting and because, again, I am a dog.
As he worked, he talked to me.
"Blessing in disguise, Bear."
I was not convinced.
He explained anyway.
The smaller branches and leaves could become wood chips for the garden. They would hold moisture, protect the soil, break down over time, and become part of the earth that grew the things he planted.
The larger branches and trunk became logs.
"Firewood," he told me.
The wood would dry, and when winter came to the mountains, he would carry those logs inside and burn them in the fireplace.
By the time he finished, the tree was gone.
Really gone.
The branches were gone. The leaves were gone. The trunk was gone. Only the stump remained, stubbornly planted in the earth as if refusing to admit what had happened.
The yard looked wrong.
That bothered me most.
There had always been something there, and now there was empty sky. No shade. No branches overhead. No squirrels arguing with me from the safety of the canopy.
Nothing.
Loss, I discovered, has a shape.
Sometimes it is the shape of an empty place.
But then I began noticing where the tree had gone.
Some of it was piled near the garden. Some was stacked as firewood. Some would become wood chips and disappear into the soil.
The tree was absent from the yard, but pieces of it were everywhere.
That confused me at first.
Then I began thinking about our home. Leaves fall, soften, darken, and become part of the earth. Plants grow from that earth. Wood becomes shelter, mulch, or heat.
Everything seems to be borrowing something from something else.
Even my Man's endless chores began to look different. He was not merely moving things from one place to another, although I maintain that a considerable portion of human labor appears to consist of exactly that.
He was participating in it.
The land provided, but it did not provide automatically. Someone had to cut, stack, plant, repair, preserve, gather, carry, and prepare.
Maybe that was why the work grounded him.
His hands were part of the cycle.
I began to understand what he meant by a blessing in disguise, although I still would not have chosen those words.
I would rather have my tree.
That matters.
Learning what the fallen oak could give us did not make me miss its shade less. Knowing the branches would help the garden did not replace the afternoons I spent beneath them. Firewood did not restore the familiar shape outside the front door.
Perhaps that was the lesson.
Something new does not have to replace what was lost.
You can miss what was.
And you can be grateful for what it becomes.
Months from now, winter will settle into these mountains. The trails will become cold beneath my paws. Perhaps snow will cover the yard.
We will come inside. My Man will take off his boots. I will shake snow and water all over the floor, despite his objections.
Then he will put one of those logs into the fireplace.
My log.
From my tree.
The fire will catch slowly. Then the wood will crackle, and warmth will spread across the room. I will stretch out in front of it, taking up more floor than a dog my size should reasonably require.
My Man will sit nearby.
And perhaps I will remember summer.
I will remember cool grass against my belly, a great canopy of green above me, and squirrels racing along branches, convinced they were safe. I will remember lying in the shade while my Man hauled something heavy across the yard and complained that he had too much work to do.
I will still miss the tree.
But I understand something now that I did not understand before the storm.
It did not stop giving when it fell.
It simply began giving differently.
The shade became wood chips for the garden. The branches became part of the soil. The trunk became winter warmth.
And the memories remained exactly where they had always been.
With me.
So perhaps loss is not always the moment when something disappears. Sometimes it is the moment when we have to learn how to recognize it in its new form.
I am still going to miss that shade, though.
And the squirrels have already relocated to another tree.
Which means I have work to do.
© by Benjamin R Tousley
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