Requiem For a Third Street Elm Tree

Yesterday an elm tree was removed from Third Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.

Old First's Pastor Daniel Meeter, who seems to have had a special relationship with that tree, was there.

On his blog you can read his requiem for that tree, which was five stories tall. He describes it this way: "Its cloven trunk was wonderfully vertical, in the manner of a deep forest tree. Urban elms more typically have great spreading limbs, torquing and twisting like great dancers in their places." Here is an excerpt:

"This spring it barely budded at all. And so they came to take it down. Today, Thursday.

 

The tree surgeon was up in his bucket when I got there, but he asked me not to take his picture. As they lowered him I thought of a preacher in an old high pulpit, not least because of how loudly and confidently he was declaiming to all the people standing round, both workers and watchers. He announced that the tree had not died from Dutch elm disease. He said it died from what "someday will happen to me, and to you, and to you, and to you, and to every other living thing: old age." He knows a lot more about trees then I do, but I don't believe it died from old age. I wonder how much of what I say my parishioners do not believe?

 

"Thank you tree, for the wonderful beauty you gave us while you lived. Thank you God for this tree. The birds thank you, and so do the bugs."

.