I live in a pretty college town in a lush, green valley, in a state famous for its forests and magnificent coastline. The timber industry has held sway here since the late 1800s. Forestry has its own college at the university, and it’s not uncommon to wait at a traffic light behind a huge logging truck, piled high with Douglas fir on its way to a mill somewhere. My husband’s business even rents warehouse space from one of the old timber families in this area. Cutting down trees is part of the economic landscape; it’s what we do in Oregon.

But there are trees for wood products and there are trees for wonder.

Last week the neighbors directly behind us decided to actualize their casual remark about “taking down the white fir,” the one with the double trunk, where a single tree had split itself into two perfectly matched spires reaching ten stories high or more. The tree I have stared at for nine years now, the tree I have watched crows and hawks fly in and out of on winter evenings, blue-black against the sun’s last rays. The tree whose dark, feathery branches would wildly dance and skip in the wind coming off the Pacific, just forty-five miles to the west of here. The tree I had come to regard as holy metaphor of some essential relationship, perhaps my own marriage, or the lives of my aged parents.

In a matter of hours, the stately, familiar fir towers of my neighborhood were no more. Now, staring out the window on this gray Sunday afternoon, the sky feels empty.

‘Tis the season for melancholy, for things to fall from the sky, bright leaves and long shadows. Soon now, I will visit my parents, 88 and 90, in Florida for Thanksgiving. While eager to go, I also dread what I will find. My mother in a recent phone call spoke of her legs as “lead.” She says she cannot walk from one room to another anymore in their little yellow house. She will be wheelchair-bound any day, as she moves into the final stage of Parkinson’s. In one conversation we talked of cremation.

Her once-lovely face has taken on a flat, mask-like appearance, and sometimes her hands thrash in the air. She can still be lucid and funny, but often confuses me with my younger sister, calling me Carla, or telling me things that I recently told her, reporting them as though they are news. My father bears not only the lion’s share of her care, but his own progressive suffering from arthritis. They joke about their infirmities—which is healthy, no doubt, but painful and disconcerting for my siblings and me. We walk a strange new road, full of uncertainty, rutted with doubts and fears for our own futures. It often feels as though everything once sure and solid is falling down.

So I find myself turning to the poets I love for consolation. Rainer Maria Rilke, in a life riddled with despair, spoke yet of divine hope in his tender “Autumn”:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no”.

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars into loneliness.

We’re all falling, this hand here is falling
And look at the other one…it’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands,
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

After a walk last Friday I went to my neighbor’s yard to see the carcass of the white fir. I came to pay my respects, to view the body, to behold the earthly beauty of the sacred form I had loved. I was stunned to see how large the base was, perhaps three feet across, an old, ringed giant. I don’t know what my neighbors plan to do with the enormous pile of wood, certainly abundant fuel for several woodstoves. The longest lengths from the base of the split trunk would make splendid dugout canoes. But I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s line, in her poem about a forest fire—“Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light.”

May it be so, may it be so.