The Murder Next Door

From where I sit I watch them, three strapping young men, roping their victim as one would a bucking steer.

But the victim stands impassive, moving only in a breeze, letting his limbs be savaged.
They cut right through; a mighty length of trunk swings free; then down, down to the grass.

Where we all come to, in the end.

Tears rise in my eyes as each body part descends. I know a crime when I see it. This is murder, the heedless tearing down of a grand, generous life.

The oak was there before our redbrick houses rose on this ground. It was a young light thing when Lincoln was shot, downtown. It stood, drinking and thinking its tree thoughts, turning sunlight to sugars, throwing out new limbs and leaves. Patiently it added ring upon ring, offering its arms to the annual rite of spring. It housed cardinals, sparrows, tufted titmice; it fed squirrels, nets of gypsy moths, cicadas. It had a whole existence of its own, about which we, its neighbors, chose to know less than nothing.

And it asked us for nothing – except to be left alone.

Now the house has been sold, part of the continuing madness as homebuyers swarm like flies on a carcass over this neighborhood, the last place inside the DC Beltway where you can get a house for under half a million. (Fifty thousand over the ask! No inspection! All cash!)

Ah, but to be only three miles from the snack aisles at Trader Joe’s!
I bet the new people like snacks.
I bet they don’t like “dirt” - raking, pollen, clogged gutters.
So why the hell didn’t they buy a nice condo downtown?

In America there’s no social compact: strangers choose houses, not neighbors.
They count bathrooms, not kids for their kids to play with.
They measure commutes, not like-mindedness.

So no one asked if we minded. They probably didn’t even realize their tree was someone I loved. Not that it would have mattered.

They are taking my green canopy and giving me – what? – more sky I don’t want.
(Not knocking the sky, mind you.)

Anyhow, it’s their oak now, and I can do, as in so very much these days, nothing.

But I go next door nonetheless, just to ask, hoping there’s a reason, needing to let someone know it’s a death that is not going unnoticed. Only everyone speaks Spanish, and I don’t. “Es triste,” I say, and the old man with the three teeth nods.

When I come back inside I find my new guest, the sun, raiding my space like a glad smiling pirate. It’s too bright to see to write. Our pleasant sun room, once awash with light in the afternoons, is even now – a sauna. As, soon, our Earth.

And to think we bought a Prius, all smug -- like that might change anything.