substack.com · 5 hours ago

A Love Letter to Our Red Oak

A crack down the trunk of a century-old red oak - discovered on an ordinary fall afternoon, confirmed by four arborists before evening - undoes two years of architectural plans drawn specifically to protect it. The writer doesn't reach for easy consolation, sitting instead with the strange grief of losing something that was never quite possessed: "Can we really own a tree? It belongs to something greater than us, as beauty does." What surfaces in the loss is a quiet accounting of how much of life is held together by things we never consciously notice - the tree that appears first over the hill, the marker that says *home*, the presence felt before it's ever seen. The plans remain rolled on the dining table, a staircase drawn three feet into a drip line that no longer needs protecting. The writer's children won't remember the oak, but the next tree, he knows, will become theirs the same way: something that has always just been there.