This essay was originally published in May 2022.
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The hickory tree in the front yard was dying.
Little stairsteps of fungus had sprung up, pulsing out of the roots and pushing through the pine straw at the base of the tree. The shelf mushrooms clustered all along the north side, spiraling around the trunk like a spine. Within a year of first noticing it, the invaders had already multiplied.
It was a large, mature tree (my guess is it was at least 80 years old, though may have been far older), giving shade to the whole front side of the house, including my corner room upstairs. Each year, we collected the hickory nuts, shelled, and ate them. We’d do a sort of harvest exchange with my grandmother (while her teeth could still tolerate nuts); we’d give her the nuts from our yard and she would share the bounty of scuppernongs (muscadine grapes) from the vine in hers.
This beautiful, bountiful hickory, standing tall in all the images of our home, had been a part of our lives for the entire time we’d lived there. Now both of these truths were coming to an end.
The death of this tree is not a metaphor for a household in decay, the seemingly healthy chlorophyllic canopy cloaking the rottenness festering inside. You won’t find a whole lot of dark secrets here; there was plenty of delight and joy and love in our home. Even with the expected misstep every once in a while (we’re all human), it was about as rosy a family life as one might hope for. So, in this case, a tree is just a tree.
But it means something now that it’s gone. Because we’re gone, too.
If I’m writing a newsletter about home, I should probably go back to the start.
Image: The last photo of my family in front of the house, Fall 2019.
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