The Tree

My mother died a year ago last Monday. When someone so close to you passes away it seems the world should shudder to a stop. Or come crashing down with loud, harsh fanfare that rattles you to your core. It seems the world should sense this enormous loss, recognize it, quiet down and wait. But it did not. The cars passed by and the birds chirped outside my mother’s home the day I stepped into her bedroom. She had been taken out of that very room only 24 hours before.  But the sun shone in. The breeze blew by. Her recently planted bulbs fully bloomed swayed in the yard below.

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I inherited my mother’s camera after she passed. And I still have not deleted the last pictures she took. They were of branches strewn across her yard. They were also of a tree. An enormous tree in front of our house had been the object of her recent frustration. This tree, one that towered over and awed me as a child, was not well. The root structure was compromised and the city had been pruning it on the street side only. She knew it was not viable. And so in her usual determined way, she pressed the city, wrote the mayor and rose as much of a ruckus as she could about that damn tree. They never responded.

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This past Monday I was on Cape Cod, with family all around. My aunt called me. “How are you today?” she asked. I was ok. I figured this was the best place to be to honor her that day. I just wished I could get some sign from her, you know? Just so that I knew she was still around. She understood. She told me she loved me and we hung up.

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An hour later I stood in front of my mother’s parents’ grave. And my fathers’ parent’s grave. Both are buried in the same cemetery here on Cape Cod. I dropped a hydrangea bloom on each stone and packed the kids back into the car. We were on our way to collect my father from the airport.

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I stood in the wind at Race Point on Cape Cod, the northern-most tip of this peninsula. There was a small airport and we expected my father’s Cape Air flight at any moment.  And at the top of the visitor center I finally found cell phone reception. “What do you mean the tree is down????” My brother had just called. There had been a terrible storm a half hour earlier and the tree – my mom’s tree, the one I still had pictures of on my camera in my bag – had fallen into my parent’s home. An entire telephone pole had snapped in half too. Wires were down and alive in the yard. The entire root structure exposed. No one could even see my home. No one knew the extent of the damage. There had been a great deal of fanfare this July 25th. Thundering crashes, traffic blocked, the everyday was stopped for the time being, total chaos.

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My father was on the phone. We were all gathered in the living room of my family’s Cape cottage listening to him on the phone with my brother. “Who is there? Channel 7???… The Mayor????” We stared at each other. With live wires still sparking in my parent’s front lawn and the downed tree blocking the entire view of the house, the Mayor had arrived and had just held a press conference. Right there. At our home. He promised the city would be taken care of and that power would be restored.

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The tree is off the house now. The power lines are being restored. The damage doesn’t seem to be anything desperate. I think it’s going to be ok.

A sign. I had only asked for a sign.