Crowns

Some of the trees here, on the grass between the sidewalks and the pavement and in the thick parts of the unkept backyards that stretch on in long rectangles to the potholeded alleys, are old enough to have multiple appendages one would rightly call limbs. These are not the standard 'biggest branch' limbs every sapling earns on its tenth or twentieth or thirtieth birthday, the first two or four up the trunk that branch off several more times; even newborns have brachial tubes and pulmonary arteries and all that. No. These are limbs: separate, distinct, big. These are limbs that thrust outward and upward from the hearts of trees whose roots have stirred the soil for longer than the feces of any individual man or woman alive today; these are limbs which themselves are probably older than anyone save for a few isolated souls living on that Japanese long-life island.
Most of these limbs belong to the big oak trees spaced regularly along the city's older, nicer residential streets, with tree-age and thus limb-thickness increasing with street-age and residence-niceness. These are the attractive ones, the classic four limbs spreading up at regular angles to form round crowns that look soft, supple and wise from a distance, the product of generations of doting city landscapers doing their best to prune and prod these things through wicked winters and blistering droughts. The oaks and the spruces and the towering elms that fill in the back lots, the park edges and the extra patches are the kissing cousins, the war vets, the robust simpletons, the out-of-sight-and-minders: a missing side here (lightning), a torn canopy there (wind), a catastrophic collapsed crown (rot) just behind that one house's fence.
You can extrapolate a lot from these trees, and you can guess a whole lot more. You can hypothesize based on its size and condition and type who planted a tree and why, but it's much more fun to imagine what sorts of goings-on the tree itself was privy to--whose stories it knows and whose it knows of--all down through the years. These beasts, after all, hang over our town as if to taunt us with the promise of their knowledge-stories, shrouding our cute conservative little city, otherwise unremarkable, in the uncertain forgottens of its past. Things occurred here, they whisper sardonically, conveying their understanding in a way that the ever-changing exhibits at the Past and Present Museum downtown can't. Those oakey-piney things (what are they?) on Newton, south of Broad? Surely some of them, younger and fresher and enjoying a lower and stabler center of gravity, saw those defiant mobsters bleed their last on the streetside at the hands of the Pinkertons, or whoever, during that infamous Prohibition-era gunbattle. Or those brutal ashes, the hulking specimens (always curving one way or another, slowly at first and then almost horizontally to the crown, as if they've realized they've gone too far) whose limbs don't start until half or two-thirds of the way up their diamond-studded lengths, that lord over the woodsy alleyways of the Shelbyville section: they must have been there at the start, maybe seeding fallow fields in the homesteading years or dropping timber for the construction of civilized things as the railroad barons built and improved upon the land.
But death comes for all, even the greats. Even now some of these guys are beginning to succumb to the rot or to one too many dry summers and fall on their own (or at least issue that terminal cry for removal, the leafless-crown-come-Junetime). Already most have outlasted their peers on the open fold; the stands of oaks, elms and maples out on the savanna tend to bow to the wind once they hit their fourth story without a ravine to protect them, and these back-lot towerers would have been no different had the city not pressed them to its bosom. One day soon they will begin to fall in earnest--the whirr of machines carting their skeletons off to the trash-burner supplanting the lusty whisper of leafy bough-wind, the harsh midday glare burning up the grasses on which successive generations of children might have lain to watch the swaying and smiling above. And then to whom will we turn for advice? But no one will remain who might rightly claim to carry a piece of the old times, the beginning times, wrung tight about their core in the literal fiber of their being; but no one with the bones or the wood. New sprouts will fill in the gaps, and in time perhaps beat back the sun and snow and restore the moody shade that so informs these streets, and new children, parents and those-with-no-business-here will dance their dance beneath them. The recycling process will continue, as it never really ended, and this will be well and good and part of the order of things. But something will be different: the leaves and branches, crowns and limbs, may flash their equivalence and smile their assurances, but something will be gone, or at least returned to a form so elemental it will defy identification, and there will be loss.