All this year I have been mourning, but for nothing or nobody.
Every day I'd wake up with the same feeling. That deep sadness that you feel when someone you love has died. Then I would walk down to the builders yard where I work, look up at the trees over hanging the space and feel much better.
Breathing in the moist damp air from beneath a beautiful small leaf lime, over 20 meters high. Home to a pair of jays, numerous wood pidgeons, squirrels and the lime hawk moths who came to lay their eggs once a year. The tree would give me a wonderful feeling and make me glad to be alive.
The end of the line for the small leaf lime tree
and our lime hawk moths enjoying life to the full last year
Then out of the blue, we were informed by the owners of the garden that the lime tree grew in, that they were having the tree cut down.
They hated the lack of light in their flat and couldn't be bothered with having it cut back regularly to resolve the problem. Nothing we could say would change their mind, even offering to pay for it to be trimmed was no good, they just wanted to get rid of the tree. It was their right and they could.
Why are people so obsessed with light and hate trees so much. Ironic when I sometimes feel the world is descending into darkness, maybe that is why?
Two weeks later our other neighbours on the other side of our yard cut down all their trees too. Now we just have to stare at all their dull houses.
The saddest thing of all was the wood pidgeon. After they chopped the last of the trees down, he was flying around searching wildly for his nest and chicks, then he picked up a single twig in his beak, all that was left of the last tree and sat on our fence bewildered.
From Emma Calder's note book 2011
Then I thought I knew what all my grief had been leading up to.
But, I was wrong!
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