Blue Tape

While I was visiting her the other day, Opal casually let it drop that the reformation of the Willowview house to her and Iris’ specifications will involve cutting down the three 30-foot tall maple trees in the backyard, two of which my father planted as saplings back when he and she moved in, plus a dozen smaller pine trees along the back line of the property that he planted likewise.  (It will also involve the destruction of the pinewood deck attached to the house that he built himself from the ground up, but no-one has bothered to make this observation out loud, as it pretty much goes without saying.)  When I expressed my outrage at this, Opal responded with a carefully rehearsed phrase about it being “necessary” in order to build the addition.  When I then went on to ask her how the construction workers who added the in-ground pool in the 1970s had managed to pull off that entire project without cutting down those same trees, and also whether or not it would also be necessary to fill in the pool to effect the addition, since it was closer to the house than most of the trees in question, she faltered and made some vague observations about how one of the trees was a “swamp maple” that had already been there when they arrived, and how the other one “really should have come down last year” and other absurdities.   The reality, of course, is that she long ago decided that she would rather not have to worry about the trees anymore, and now with Iris behind her and my dad gone, she has the support and the excuse to do something about it.   It’s about fear, and about burdens-   and of course, about the pool:  the pool, the pool, that all-coveted, all-meaningful sink of fucking chlorine water.  Trees drop leaves in my pool, she is saying to herself. Trees block the sun from shining on my pool.  Trees have dead branches that might fall on me and kill me. And who will disagree?  Iris?  Trees will block the sunshine from streaming through the oversized bay windows of the private castle she’s building on the ashes of our childhoods.  Trees might crush its walls.

The trees themselves, meanwhile, stand silently, where they have stood my entire life, nodding in the hot summer wind, dappling me with precious shade-  only now, each one has a thin ribbon of bright blue tape wound around it, tied at the front with a bow knot.  They don’t know what it means…

Opal is considering leaving and going to her condo in Florida for the eight months it will take for the construction to completed.  I’d like to do the same thing, although not to Florida.  The difference is, I don’t want to come back.