Eternity Interrupted: When Trees Fall

They were two perfectly healthy, lush, high-rising maples that pre-dated our insignificant subdivision by forty or fifty years. They were two high-rises of habitats for the birds and bugs, moths and lizards, spiders, squirrels, beetles, bees, planthoppers, grasshoppers, zorapterans and moth-gazers that made them their home or their lay-over, their rest stop, their tourist dives, their summer rentals. Like all trees they only gave of themselves and took nothing in return unless it was a good rain, a bracing wind, a sheltering sky. They rose there for seventy, eighty, maybe ninety years, the first half of their life encumbered only by the pine-heavy forest around them, the second half by the flattening of developers, the asphalt of the cul-de-sac, the walls and roofs of the houses around it, ours included, and the comings and goings of owners and renters by the dozen every decade, this being Florida, land of transience and exploits: People come, take advantage, then either die or move on to bigger square footage after remaking their surroundings in their Sears-comforts’ image which, more often than not, deploys and destroys more than it preserves. There are generous exceptions. William Bartram’s disciples live here, too. But even two million exceptions would be overwhelmed by the other thirteen (and the seven thousand who move in every day), to whom environmental scruples have the sympathy of roadkill. Read the rest...