‘There was always something left to take.’
The house was built around the tree. Its roots grew deep and strong. The building plans were rearranged when a thick root couldn’t be cut. They moved in at that point, a young couple in their own home. They picked two leaves from the branch and pressed them between pages of a thick book.
The tree’s shade held the woman reading. Most days, she spent hours under the canopy. The man joined sometimes. Sometimes with food, other times with drinks. Once, they came out in the moonlight and shared themselves against the bark.
As the leaves fell, they raked, bagged, and burned them. That time, they stood next to the firelight instead of under the bare tree.
The couple decided that the branches were too low. They couldn’t stand up straight under the boughs. Honey-grained wood—a pale interior marked by tightened rings. The bark made the sawed spots stand out even more. The live sap slowly dried, the surface roughening—soon you could only tell where the branches used to be by the knots left behind.
They burned the scraps and roasted food over the flames. The woman picked some leaves from the last branch before throwing the wood into the pit.
The couple left it alone during the snow. Squirrels tested its limbs. Birds nested among the branches. It remained that way until spring. Limbs drooped under the weight of growth and rain showers. The water caught in the leaves and pooled in the knots of bark.
It was never taken all at once. The first months of summer held little humidity. The bark grew brittle as the moss calcified. The wife broke it off in chunks, absentmindedly, as pages turned. Soon enough, the wet white wood met her nail.
She showed the man. He took a knife from his pocket and scored the tree where she had peeled it. The knife dug in, loosening water and sap until it clung to the blade. The air dried that out, too. That mark didn’t fade the way the others had. It had been dug too deeply, carved out too much.
She picked the small leaves. The ones that had enough shape to press. Always from the same branch—the last one that hung lowest to the ground. The one they ended up hanging a tire swing from a month later.
The tree had a thick, sturdy trunk. From there, it split into five stronger branches, and it kept growing. One of the five branches was deemed too dead to remain attached. A crew came in, and the giant branch was reduced to dust and logs. A gap framed the sky.
The man kept two of the bigger logs. He spent days sitting in the remaining shade, cutting into those logs until they formed seats. When he finished, he strung lights through the branches and set a table with a nice meal. He gave her a ring, and the string lights never came down.
The ground around the trunk was uneven. The small tiller was borrowed, not bought. A neighbor walked it over and showed the man how to use it. It roared to life. The blades did what they were meant to do. The tiller tore through the earth around the tree, deep enough to catch the roots near the surface. The blades caught on the thicker ones, jolting the tiller upward. The roots snapped, heard even over the motor. The circle wasn’t perfectly even, but five feet of tilled earth surrounded the trunk. It took the better part of the afternoon.
The tree had the evening to reassess itself.
By morning, the earth was covered with a black tarp—suffocating everything underneath. The tarp was buried with thick layers of mulch. The man spent time making sure the mulch didn’t land on the grass. He evened out the lumps, then brought the woman out to look.
They hugged and kissed under the branches.
The days passed. Summer storms came. Water filtered through the wood chips and collected against the tarp. The smell of earth lingered, stifled.
The tire swing pulled a little lower by the end of summer—the weight of the bough creaked with every breeze.
