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Novelist Janet Fitch has been chronicling on Facebook the ravages of last week's windstorm on her street, including a deck fire next door and the loss of a eucalyptus tree she says is a hundred years old. (Could be — there are older ones around L.A.) On her blog, she turns to verse to mark the giant's passage into firewood and sawdust. "Thought it needed a better sendoff than just the chainsaw and the wood chipper," she writes. Excerpt:
The tree man arrives.He says: Six men.
A full chainsaw day and maybe two.
Even sideways, it’s twenty feet high.
Shakes his head
and gives me a good talking to.
Had I pruned it
reduced its shaggy bulk
subtracted boughs and limbs,
it might be alive today.
“Took that wind like a sail,”
he says.But I’m learning lately
maybe you can’t control everything.
More at her blog.
Facebook photo: Janet Fitch