My Weeping Willow Trees

When the house was built back in '91, the far back corner of the yard was a low spot that filled with water after heavy rains and held a small pond after the snow melted.  The land was 6' tall grass - my youngest calls it buffalo grass - on a tan clay surface. The whole field had to be cleared, dirt from the basement excavation spread out over it, and then seed scattered to give us an actual lawn. 

Or so they thought. It never has conformed to suburban standards. We like it that way.

We had the back fenced because our two keeshonds, Sam and Bridget, or "Sambridgee" as they were jointly called, needed a place to run and we couldn't keep up. Each weighed enough to make divots in the muck with every step. It never got rolled to smooth it out, because it would have been wasted effort, even as grass, clover, and miscellaneous weeds filled it in. We learned to live with it, and be glad that enough plants grew to keep the house from turning into a frame around clay carpets. 

But the sometimes corner pond remained. Conversation with a neighbor informed us that they'd dealt with the same issue, but solved it by planting several weeping willows along their back property line. They grew fast and the deep roots broke through the clay so it could drain. I loved the idea of weeping willows, long a favorite tree. A house we lived in when the kids were very little got a weeping willow planted in the front yard and within a couple years was climbable, due to judicious pruning to space the strongest limbs, and its perfect location for nutrients and moisture. My daughter nicknamed the tree "Alice". My daughter had since grown and left, but I welcomed the idea of a second "Alice" for the new yard. There was a grandchild on the way.

I wound up with two willows. They bore the "Alice" names for a bit but the names got forgotten. Two were all we had room for in the corner, with all the other things we'd already planted or were planning to plant all around the yard. I'd started hunting for some but it turned out they were not popular trees at the local nurseries. They have their special needs and those are either on your land or not. They are perfect for the right situation, otherwise something of a weed. Or else they simply die.

After a few weeks of hunting I located a place which happened to be something I passed regularly without noticing it, just a few miles along the highway from the house. I popped in and decided, small though it was, I'd ask about willows anyway. He'd just had a shipment that morning but hadn't potted them yet so they weren't ready. Couldn't he sell them bare root? We'd plant them right away and he'd be saved the time and expense of potting them. He hemmed and hawed, went in his office and ran some figures, and came back with a price of $10 each for two. (Potted I think they would have run around $25. each.) I was delighted, got them loaded in the car, about 5 feet of slender branches sticking out a back window with the roots partly up on the dashboard, and drove straight home to plant them with Paul, my youngest.

That isn't all the story of that sale, however. I never went back to that place to buy anything else from him. I avoided it ever since, and most of his trees didn't sell but got planted on the premises, sign long gone, business closed. It may be he managed to turn off his customers the way he turned me off to the point where I could barely stand to remain long enough to complete the sale. Why? Because for no particular reason, completely irrelevant to our business, and having no reason to be inserted into the conversation, nearly every sentence he uttered was full of the "N-word". There were no black families in the area to have ticked him off at that point, though several have moved in since. None of his complaints were anything but pure venom, bile just to be ornery, ugliness for the sake of being ugly.

I never held their start against the enjoyment of those trees. As predicted, they grew fast, tall, sturdy, and got pruned several times a year with an eye to becoming climbing trees. I told the kids, for my granddaughter brought along her little half brother (another story), that they could climb in the trees all they wanted to, on one strictly enforced condition. The first branches were about three feet off the ground. The kids, in order to be safe in the trees, had to be able to manage getting up in them by themselves. They managed that as soon as possible and spent long hours up in them, climbing around, viewing the neighborhood from various perches. I cooperated by pruning to keep them safe for use, and the trailing branches short enough to sway just off the ground, filling in as yellow curtains around the trees at spring catkin time. 

Eventually there was a problem. I think they were growing too fast. We noticed a hollow in one trunk after a particularly hard winter. It was rotting from the inside out. Water got in, froze, expanded, thawed, left with a larger space for the next freeze-thaw and the next. I no longer believed them safe. That fall, before more winter damage could ensue, I had a party for cutting them down with chain saws and axes. My daughter and her husband brought a chain saw and started cutting low through the trunk of the first before we suddenly saw a problem and insisted they stop. The trunk luckily was still safe for an adult to climb up a ways and secure a rope to pull it as it fell in the direction we needed it to fall! Just in time too. Saved the fence and the neighbor's ire.

The second tree was safely roped ahead of time for its go round. Once down, branches got removed, cut up, trunk pieces cut into huge chair-sized chunks and vertically stacked for later splitting, and over the next few weeks the debris was organized for next summer's bonfires. Over ensuing years, the pillars of trunk pieces were pretty much left alone since nobody really wanted to bother splitting them. Woodpeckers made a nest in one chunk for a couple years. Eventually the ignored sections started rotting to the point where they were punky enough to break up by hand and made great kindling. Before their final removal, a dogwood bush was planted in the now reasonably dry corner. Later paper birches were placed in an "L" back in the corner, springing up enormously straight and tall, and edible elderberries filled in, another fruit to harvest for jelly. That whole corner has gone wild, lucky if a mower forces a way through every couple-three years so people can get through. Or perhaps it's the people who have to go through every couple-three years so a mower can get back there. This summer yellow iris have clumped around the remains of the old dogwood, waiting for it to decide it it still has a few years left in that spot or will just join the woodpile.

No trace of my willows remains. All the Alices have gone. Their job of breaking up the ground was performed beautifully. All the yard's clay has a good layer of black dirt covering it now, no matter where you dig. My weeping willows are just pleasant memories now, wistfulness waving through those memories like the branches waved over the ground, dusting the earth with yellow pollen and the laughter of children now long grown.