It was in the late fall and I heard this odd creaking. It was cold and the ground was frozen and I thought, at first, this was a creaking of the pipes, like a bubble in the hot water baseboard heat we use on the porch, or the rubbing of an expanding pipe against a wood beam. I didn’t think anything of it. I kept writing. Days passed. The noise was intermittent and I didn’t pay any attention to it until I realized (perhaps it had become louder) that the furnace was not running when I heard the noise, that there was no water passing through the baseboard when I heard it. So the sound must be coming from another source.

Days passed, nothing. I forgot about it.

Then it was back -- a cold day, a snowstorm coming, there was wind. The creaking seemed to coincide with the wind. Although I live solidly inside the woods, no trees or branches reach my house. I decided to pay attention. I walked to where the noise originated. I stood on the floor. The floor was creaking. It was timed to the wind. What?

I looked out the window. This part of the house is built, on three sides, around a tree, a pig nut, a form of hickory. When the wind of the storm blew, the tree trunk moved fractionally, the movement was timed to the creaking. Oh brother, I said.

The tree was young at one time, like all of us, and as it grew we looked at it out the big picture window like it was a column on a cathedral of nature. It grew and grew and beyond it is a patio, the backyard and pond. I knew this day might one day come, but my thought was the problem might outlive me. I see now I outlived the problem and the tree would have to come down. Very sad. My irrevocable conclusion was the beautiful tree had to be down before hurricane season.

The more I thought about it, the more it worried me. The tree had become huge, immensely tall, without making a sound. I stood outside and looked up at it. Holy mackerel, if a big wind came from the west, like the tornado we had had the previous summer, what could happen? The knee wall of the crawl space was already cracked, the root ball could lift up the porch, tearing the hot water baseboard lines, cracking the big glass window and smashing everything on the patio below. I knew the tree was healthy. That was one thing. In September it had dropped its nuts on the skylights like M-80’s.

Early spring I started calling around. I knew an experienced tree man could simply drop the tree where he wanted. But these were not normal circumstances. If the tree came down whole, it would crush my patio, take out two additional trees and break the heavy bluestone path. The tree had to come down in pieces. The tree needed a radical tree surgeon.

A couple local guys, tree climbers, were just too backed up to even look at the job. Another came, looked it over and declined on the spot. Another came and said there was no way, with the house, the patio, and the woodland to get a truck close enough to get a bucket up the tree. The tree alone was too tall for his bucket. No thanks. Another just never showed up.

Then one day a truck came in the driveway. They have wood chips. Do I want them for the garden? Yes, thank you, drop them right over here, I use them for mulch. Oh by the way, do you take down trees? Yes. Do you climb? Yes. I showed them the job

They looked at the tree, they scratched their heads, they walked around the yard -- I gave them their privacy to think.

They came up with a price. I made a counter-offer. A deal was struck.

They came on a Sunday. I didn’t want to watch. No holes in the roof, no broken patio stones, no-one hurt. Good clean-up, a pile of chunks to split.

We will always miss that tree. But the house is safe. (At least from that angle!)