My Neighbor’s Cedar Tree

A minor disaster; a major revelation

My neighbors’ gigantic cedar tree had to be cut down after nearly uprooting itself onto their house during a windstorm last week.

Last week’s Santa Anas, a Southern California phenomenon, were the strongest we’d had since I remember. They got up to 70 miles per hour, and when we awakened the next morning after a fitful sleep, it was to targeted destruction and a lot of trees and branches down.

Outside our primary bedroom window, our beloved eucalyptus had lost its two largest branches. The cedar tree had some branches either snapped off or hanging precariously; the tree itself, some forty, fifty feet tall, was leaning towards my neighbor’s house.

Since then, our lives have been backgrounded by chainsaws and wood chippers as the neighborhood cleans up. Recovers.

But the light in our primary bedroom will never be the same. Our west-facing windows always catch the weak morning light. Before, it would have been filtered by the round leaves of our silver-dollar eucalyptus; after it’d been sieved by the boughs and needles of my neighbor’s cedar. Our little balcony, on which I sometimes sat to read, felt as close to an aerie as I could get without being a bird, because of that same cedar tree.