Weeping Willow

I was the weeping willow in your backyard. When your parents first moved in, your father stepped out into the yard and squinted against the sunlight. 

“That tree will probably come down,” he said. “It takes up half the yard space and it looks sad.”

“I like it,” your mother said. She was standing in the opening of the backdoor, on the threshold between the house and the deck. Her hand rested protectively on her round belly. 

“There won’t be room for a jungle gym,” your father countered. He turned his back to me and faced your mother, but I still caught his smile. He was lovestruck.

“Let’s leave it,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “She’ll like it.”

By she, she meant you. And you did like me. I remember even now, even if you don’t.

You took your first steps beneath my hanging branches, on a warm spring day in a bright yellow sundress. I watched as your parents cheered, snapping picture after picture with a disposable camera with the flash on. 

I was never a good tree for climbing, but that didn’t stop you from trying. When you were nine and your parents started fighting so loudly that even I could hear them from outside, you tried to climb my high branches and hide between my leaves. I wanted to protect you, then and forever, but you still fell and broke your wrist. You lay there on the grass, quietly whimpering in pain until the sun had begun to set and your parents had stopped yelling to come look for you. That was the first time I wept for you.

Years came and went. One day, I stopped seeing your father altogether, and for a while after you sat under my branches and wept. But time passed as it does. We both grew taller. You kept me company day after day, reading, drawing, doing homework in my shade. Naps on hot days with half melted popsicles collecting ants in the grass. Brisk autumn winds swaying my leaves as you sat and thought. 

When you got older, when there was a new man living with you that wasn’t your father, you began talking to me. I heard your stories. I laughed with you. I thought with you. I got angry at the ones who had wronged you. I wept for you.

One humid summer day, you came up to me and put a hand on my trunk. It was then that I realized how tall you’d gotten. How long your hair had grown. How much older you had grown. 

“See you soon,” you whispered, and then your mother appeared in the doorway and told you to hurry up and that the car was packed. 

It wasn’t until then that I realized I had forgotten what loneliness felt like. 

The days after that one were all a blur. I waited and waited for you to come back, and you did, but not often. When you were around, it felt like old times again. Like spring days with you blowing dandelions off into the wind. Like the sound of wind chimes as you tried to count the clouds through my leaves. 

It never lasted long enough, and before I knew it, you were gone again. 

More years passed. You came by less often, and at some point I realized you didn’t live in that faded grey house at all anymore. Once in a while, you would come by and I would see your face in the window, but you wouldn’t come out to see me. Or you’d come by for a picnic in the backyard with a man and two young children who looked just like you, but you wouldn’t come over to sit in my shade. 

You looked happy, though, and that made me happy. 

And then one day, when it suddenly seemed as if nobody lived in the house at all, when the windows went dark and the weeds became overgrown in the garden, you came back and you sat beneath my branches. 

And you watered my roots with your tears. And again, I wept for you.

After that, you became your mother. I watched you from a distance, standing on the threshold between the house and the deck that were now yours. You started to look more and more like her, and the children who looked like you grew taller and taller. You watched from the doorway as they ran circles in my shade, tiring themselves out until they fell to the grass gasping for breath from the exercise and laughter. And I thought, Maybe I’m not so lonely after all. 

More years passed. When the children grew to their tallest and left as you once did, you sat beneath my shade again, sometimes alone and sometimes with the man. 

“This is my favorite tree,” you told him one day. There was a chilly breeze blowing your hair and my leaves. Spring was late. 

“So you’ve said,” he replied with a chuckle. “This is the one you fell out of, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” you said, and I could tell you were remembering that day, and even parts of it that I didn’t know myself. “My mom stopped my dad from cutting it down when they first moved in. I took my first steps under it. You can’t even imagine the number of hours I spent sitting here when I was young.”

It was then that I realized you were no longer young. Your hair had gone silver at the roots and you looked much thinner than I remembered. Your eyes, once bright and playful, felt tired and old beyond their years. Even your voice sounded quieter and wearier. The only thing that felt the same was your smile. 

That was the last time I saw you smile. 

After that, I only ever saw you from the house, in the window or in the doorway. You became shorter, hunched over with age and shaky on your feet. The man was no longer around, and I could tell you were alone in that old house with the faded shutters. You couldn’t walk down the deck stairs, much less through the uneven yard to sit beneath my branches again. Eventually, I stopped catching glimpses of you through the windows entirely. 

I knew, then, that you weren’t coming back at all. 

The cycle repeated, but nothing was the same without you. I watched a new family move into the empty shell of the house where you once lived. They had older children, but they never came outside to sit with me. I caught glimpses of them, talking, laughing, tapping away at screens.

For a few years, I watched them live their lives through the windows and I tried to convince myself that was enough, but time became distorted and the shadows in the windows morphed, and nothing felt the same as it once did.

“This is the tree you want removed?” a strange man asked the other man--the man I had seen through the windows--yesterday. “It’s not bad looking. Weeping willow, huh?”

“It’s huge,” the somewhat familiar man stated. “And an eyesore at this point. We don’t even come out here because it takes up so much space. How much will it cost to cut down? We want to put in an in-ground pool next summer.” 

“For a huge tree like this?” the other man asked. He looked up at me and then down at the ground. He kicked one of my roots. “You’re looking at about a grand at least.”

The familiar man made an unpleasant noise in his throat and kicked up some of the dirt at his feet.

“Fine,” he finally said. “How soon can it come down?”

“I can get my guys out here tomorrow afternoon.”

The sun is rising now. You always preferred the sunrises to the sunsets. The sky is yellow like the dress you wore when my life began. 

For the last time, I am weeping.