The Cottonwood Tree

by Donna Schoenkopf

It is summer, 2003.

I am in Oklahoma. I am not used to the heat. It’s beyond humid. I feel as though I’m drowning. I am determined to find a piece of property in Oklahoma because I’ll be retiring on June 30, 2007 and, up until now, have had no luck in finding anything decent.

My requirements are that my property must be in the country, it must be beautiful, and it must be affordable.

On each of the preceding summers I have either been shown property deep in the woods, twenty miles from town usually with a trailer hidden in the trees with pit bulls staked outside and windows covered with aluminum foil OR they are scrappy pieces of land in the city limits in the ugliest sections of town.

I am not disheartened, but I am impatient. My real estate agent is young and I’m probably one of his first clients. He’s sweet and gentle and tries very, very hard to please me but things aren’t working out. I have one day left before my plane takes me back to California. I am in my stressy mood. I (trying to make a joke, but he thinks I’m serious) grab him by the shirt with both hands, draw him close to my face, and growl, “Do not let me go back to California without buying something.”

He nervously hands me the listings and wishes me good luck and I find myself on my own.

As luck would have it, I find the property of my dreams on the first try.

It’s four miles south of the little town of Tecumseh. Just far enough to be in the country but not too far to be in Crazy Land. It has beautiful rolling hills. It has a pond. It has a pad already scraped clean on the top of a hill overlooking that pond.

And most wonderful of all, it has a cottonwood tree. A cottonwood tree perfectly placed on the edge of that pad, which will be the shade for the south side of my house (once it’s built) and whose leaves will dance in the merry little breezes to make me happy. The tree is about eight or ten feet tall. It’s spindly and cute.

I rush back to the real estate office, sign the papers, leave my deposit, pack my bags, and fly back to California.

My first, my very first piece of property. Wow.

Back in California, my thoughts are constantly on the land I’ve just bought. It’s like my boyfriend. I can’t stop thinking about it, dreaming of different scenarios, designing the house in my mind and on paper, using children’s wooden building blocks sometimes to see it in 3D, and in every rendering I place my beautiful, darling, lovely cottonwood tree next to the house. It stands on the south side of my imaginary house, graceful branches shading me and rustling in the breeze. It is what will make my house environmental by shading it in the summer and dropping its leaves in the winter. It will make my life sweet and my utility bills low. The cottonwood tree is at the center of my vision of what my life will be like out there on the prairie.

I return to Oklahoma the next summer to see my dear mother and to show her the property. She has always wanted to live in the country. She’s almost completely blind at this point and can’t breathe well. (Good old cigarettes. She once told me that she loved cigarettes so much she could eat ’em.) She stays in the car when I show the hill and the pond and cottonwood tree to others in my family. It’s too hot and miserable for her, the hills are too difficult to climb, she’ll never see it.

I return the next summer. Mother has grown frail and so very small. She weighs 89 pounds. I tell her to hold on, that I will be back soon and that I will have goats and chickens for her and a garden and a beautiful room of her own and we’ll be happy together.

But she can’t hold on. And in 2005, after her golden years have stretched into an ever-diminishing world in which there are no more bridge games with her women friends and no more good times with her family, she dies a gentle death, her children with her as she ever so quietly breathes her last.

I return each summer. The cottonwood tree grows by leaps and bounds. Every time I return to walk the property it seems to have doubled, tripled, its size. It is magical. I love it intensely. Of everything on the property it is my favorite thing.

I build my house. I tell Peewee to be careful of the cottonwood, that it will shade my house in the summer. It’s part of my environmental, sustainable plan. Trees make the difference between a house squatting in the hot, hot sun, baking, in need of refrigerated air, and a house that sits in shade and coolness. Ahhhh, Nature.

God. I love trees. Seriously.

I moved into my house in January of 2008. The cottonwood grew into a tall, majestic tree, forty or fifty feet tall, towering above my house. It leafed out in the spring and by summer its branches spread out and shaded the length of the house. My sister and I built a deck and the cottonwood shaded that, too. I put a table under its bowers. I drank my coffee in the morning out there, on top of the world, under my cottonwood tree.

One afternoon, a couple of years ago, after a long, hot day substitute teaching, I fell onto my bed and just watched the cottonwood’s leaves dance. I saw a hummingbird zoom into it. That’s pretty, I thought. And then another hummingbird, and another and another. The whole tree was full of hummingbirds. It was glorious.

All birds, of course, love it. Woodpeckers, tiny finches, chickadees, cardinals, all make it their special place.

But last spring the cottonwood tree was a little late in putting out its leaves and about a quarter of its leaves turned brown in mid-summer and dropped.

Curious.

This spring the cottonwood was very late in leafing out. Very late. It was the last tree at Chigger Lake to push its green into the world. I wondered about it briefly, but didn’t dwell on it.

The summer here has been hot and dry again this year. The damn drought is hitting hard again. Two years of very little rain. It is even worse when the wind blows. It’s that same hot, dry wind I experienced in California during the Santa Ana winds. Joan Didion wrote about it and said that more murders are committed during Santa Anas than any other time. Raymond Chandler wrote about it in “Red Wind.”

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

And I remember a movie, It Came From Outer Space, that freaked me out because it seemed so true.

Did you know, Putnam, more people are murdered at ninety two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once—lower temperatures people are easy-going, over ninety two it’s too hot to move but just ninety two, people get irritable!

These thoughts ran through my head when I awoke one morning about a week ago and saw that the whole tree had turned brown. Overnight! No, wait. There was one branch, over my house, whose leaves remained green. I thought that those killer winds had sucked my cottonwood dry, so I dragged the hose out and laid it on the ground under its poor branches and let the water run for half an hour. I did this every day for a week.

It did no good. Whatever few leaves had still been green got yellow and began to brown, too.

In desperation I looked up pictures and information about the phenomenon and finally came across “scorch.” That’s just what my tree looks like. Scorched.

Scorch is carried by infected leaf hoppers that carry bacteria that eventually affect the xylem of a tree. The xylem cells are in the trunks and stems of plants and carry water to leaves and branches. Once the xylem cells are clogged with the bacteria, the leaves die of thirst. There is no cure.

This morning I called Orval.

Yes, he has a chain saw. Sure, he’ll cut down the tree.

We talk about whether or not I want to cut it up and have it carried off. No. That’ll cost too much. I’ll buy a chain saw and cut it up myself.

The thought of doing that—the loud, scary sound of the chain saw, the scratching of the branches, the heat of the day, the sweat, the cutting of the trunk and branches into manageable pieces, the stacking of the wood, the snakes that will crawl into the woodpile.

It’s all too much for me. I’ll have to think about it all.

So now I sit here thinking about how the death of this wonderful tree will affect me. No more shade in the summer spreading across the deck. No more coffee in the mornings under its lovely branches, no more hummingbirds to watch, nor woodpeckers or finches or cardinals or chickadees.

I don’t know how to end this story. There is only one word that I can think of.

Loss.

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