Widow's Weeds and Widow Makers

It's the language I live in.

A compass rose.. Each piece of marble points to one of the four cardinal directions.

When I try to remember what I did over summer and fall, I remember the things I didn’t do.

Gardening, for example. I let the lawn, the flowerbeds and paths follow the laws of physics into a state of entropy. I allowed natural succession to begin. My husband had built and rebuilt a small pond using the basalt and granite stones we’d hauled, over decades, from the rocky beaches of Lake Superior. Smoothed by those deep waters over geologic time, they created a perfect channel for the stream that flowed gently and musically over them. He spent entire afternoons each summer moving rocks and recalibrating the flow. After dinner, we sat in Adirondack chairs on the patio he’d built from century-old reclaimed street pavers. We toasted our tranquil life with Negronis.

I couldn't find the pond pump. My son bought a new one, but I couldn’t get it to function properly. It was just one more thing he did that I didn't know how to do.

Entropy.

Widow’s weeds. I have my own, more contemporary definition of the phrase, as elaborated here.

Shakespeare was never widowed. I doubt he would have noticed the random shoots of grass, the thistles, the creeping Charlie stealthily overtaking my unsupervised yard. They are not sonnet material.

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A widow maker tree is a dangerous tree that has been weakened by natural forces, often to the point of imminent collapse. The term is derived from the fact that these trees can be extremely hazardous and potentially lethal to those who come in contact with them.

https://woodbeaver.net/cutting-down-a-widow-maker-tree-safety-tips-and-best-practices

The tree is a soft maple of indeterminate age. Our house was built in 1913. There is a place in the concrete floor of the basement that curves inward, as if to accommodate the roots of a very large tree. Maybe it’s this one. Soft maples grow quickly. It’s scary to think that it might have reversed its course and has been dying over the the thirty-seven years since we moved in.

Because of its location — in the narrow space between our house and the house next door and entirely on our property — it keeps me awake and petrified on windy nights. We’ve had it trimmed twice. The second trimming involved driving a cherry picker through the widened gate of a chain-link fence in said neighbor’s back yard and dropping the electrical lines. To remove it entirely, the arborists would have to lift it out of the ground with an even bigger piece of equipment, raise it over the roofline, and carry it safely out of my nightmares. I’d probably have to empty a bank account or two.

Stan is coming tomorrow morning to give me an estimate.

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I love my home. I don’t want to move. My house — and the son and daughter who grew up in it, and the marriage that somehow lasted forty-three years through countless renovations — are my husband’s legacy.

I don’t want him to leave me again. I don’t want sorrow and the laws of physics and nature to make me a widow once more.