soft bark I wanted to save.

Last night was a little bit eerie.

I laid in bed all night listening to a chorus of cracking trees that echoed throughout our whole neighborhood. The power stayed out in the whole town for the next twelve hours. The police drove around shining their flashlights up into the treetops.

The cracking started at around 2 in the morning, and I had no idea what it was. It was coming from all different directions and it was clear that some of the neighbors heard it, too. I finally went to bed around 4 am after figuring out what the noises were, and laid awake listening to the trees falling apart. It made me feel helpless, because I love trees, and I wanted them to be okay. It also felt really creepy - like something bigger than all of us was at work.

I heard a tree close to our house completely crack and fall to the ground, and it scared me. But the scariest was when I heard the tree right over the corner of my bedroom begin to shatter, and I knew it was going to fall and wondered if it would come into my room through the roof. It crashed on top of our cars and onto our apple tree and scared Tiger and I so much.

The ice had changed our sky-scape. The branches looked so pretty caked in ice, like they were covered in small white blossoms and it were spring time. But it made the branches so heavy that bit by bit they came undone like puzzle pieces and all we could really do was wait and listen. Tree chorus. Not the kind I was used to.

Bits of branches and whole branches lay around the streets like discarded evidence, the aftermath of a nature vs. nature war. I really want our apple tree to be okay, and am sad that the tree next to my bedroom is falling apart.  

photos of our birch trees from September 2008.