The soundtrack of this summer is construction noise: welding, sawing, grinding, yelling, ladders banging against houses, paint slapping Edwardian front porches while a radio blasts Top 40 hits. Old family homes are falling and paving trucks dump cement on worn paths. The city is reconstructing itself.
Some older homes are being replaced with big new ones, the ones I anoint the Monster Homes, as I walk by the new buildings popping up all over Halifax’s tree-lined south end. You know the scene: an old house and its history tumbles down, and then squeezed between the neighbouring graceful porches with their swaying ferns rises a brash and shiny thing that towers over its delicate neighbours, a Goliath with parking for six. Why do they need such big garages I frown, pausing to capture the mauve irises and pink-laced dogwood leaves on my phone’s camera while filling my lungs with the lingering scent of last month’s lilacs?
A casualty of all this re-building is the trees, and so I wake to the worst sound of summer: a man-boy wielding a whining chainsaw. Or sometimes it’s a clunky dump truck, ripping roots still reaching for their underground home as they’re tossed onto a heap of mud and rubble. A reverse burial.
When the final cement is poured, the new landscaping begins. Where grass was minding its own business for 40 years arrives truckloads of sods, already browning in the heat of a late June day. Quick flowering shrubs hint at anticipation, like neat and tidy bowling pins lining the fresh new driveways. Finally, the new little trees arrive, blown on spindly legs like boys on the beach waving tiny kites.
These new plantings replace the destroyed mature gardens of previous generations, a sales ad that reads, “Look, one day you’ll have parking, and trees, too!” The new owners won’t know of the old trees, how they were lovingly watered by a family who watched “their” tree flowering and leafing and getting bigger each year.
I lost one such tree before the pandemic, a survivor of Hurricane Juan and previous neighbours. Over the little white fence separating our properties, my neighbour would scold, “That tree is sick. It’s gotta go. I worry it’ll come down on my car!” Then he’d scurry away, presumably to complain about the tree to the city.
The tree had seen better years. But after the Juan cleanup, it put out new branches, helpfully arcing away from our houses, but nevertheless wrongly accused of interfering with our electricity.
“The reason we lose power so often is because of that tree,” my neighbour would mutter, dragging his immaculate green bin from the curb on a Monday morning. “I really must call the city again.”
My green bin smelled of mold and was far from immaculate, and I’d long stopped a passionate defense of “my” tree, because technically, it was in front of his house, not mine. And it was on city land, a city tree, not mine at all. Still, I protested mildly and smiled brightly.
“D’ya think? It’s got new growth. I love that tree! It’s been here for so many years. It’s really a great tree.”
I knew I was losing the battle, and when our lights went out once too often, the power company sent another letter explaining how they really would upgrade the aging infrastructure someday, but meantime, extensive tree trimming. I worried as I watched my tree swaying prettily high above me, bent but not broken, oblivious to its fate.
In the morning I ran from my kitchen coffee to the sound of death. The chainsaws and bucket trucks had arrived. My tree was going, going, gone, early fall leaves still green as they rained down all over the street, giant branches thudding on the pavement all around our house.
It wasn’t ready to go. The tree guys, brought in from New Brunswick to augment the Halifax workforce, yelled, “Sure this one’s dead? She’s puttin’ up a fight!”
I had smiled at that tree waving its leaves as I rocked and nursed my baby, watching chipmunks chattering along its branches as I invented yet another lullaby. It was the tree I had stared at feverishly in a rainstorm, just happy it existed, while I was too sick in bed to go downstairs and make a piece of toast. The tree our dogs, now both gone, had watered and circled every time they passed it, straining at their leashes to sniff it. Our tree. I cried for days.
I asked the guys if they could saw me off a piece and they didn’t laugh. I guess I wasn’t the first to come outside in slippers, housecoat flapping, sentimental, blubbering. They cut me a few big chunks that I pushed and dragged through tears to a spot by my front steps, away from upcoming snowblowers, where the remains could rest until spring. I counted the rings but stopped at 40.
I put some smaller pieces with bark still attached in my sun room on a pile of newspapers, hoping in a year they’d be nicely dried. My friend, responding to my sad Facebook post, said that if I gave him a chunk, he’d have something made for me to remember – a bowl, maybe a plant pot.
Spring came and I went out to rake the tree’s sawdust from my little strip of front yard where most of what was left had drifted, but something strange happened. My hand broke out in an itchy red rash. Was it allergies, or just another Covid weirdness?
I backed off, but whenever I tried again to rake, it kept happening, even when I touched the chunks. I called the city, no-one could help. Weeks later, the arborist called me back. No, he’d not heard of anything toxic in the city trees. No, he’d never heard of a reaction like that from sawdust, even though I told him it was well documented online. Eventually I got rid of the large chunks and kept only a few small pieces, the ones I just couldn’t bear to say goodbye to in the green bin.
I never got a bowl or a plant pot from my friend. In fact, I seem to have misplaced him altogether. Over time I didn’t hear from him anymore.
We couldn’t visit because of the pandemic, but his emails, emojis, the other small ways we could communicate, they all stopped. Was it my fault? We’d had a miscommunication over a social media post that he’d taken offence to. I’d apologized, but he never replied. Did I call too much? Not enough? Was it just too hard to maintain some friendships through the forced isolation of Covid? Whatever the cause, I had a creeping realization the friendship was done.
I’ve made new friends too during the pandemic, classmates and Zoommates whose lives I try to share beyond the computer screen, where they introduce themselves from Vancouver, Israel, Virginia.
These days on my socially distanced walks, I’m noticing the city is planting new trees. I’ve been trying to notice nature more in general, photographing the trees through their summer glory and fall losses, looking at flowers from different angles, telling the story of this beauty. The new little trees look so brave but so tentative, like they’re wondering who will remember to water them once the gardeners drive off in their big shiny trucks.
I miss my old tree, our shared past, its hidden story, even if it did give me that weird rash.
As I miss you.
