The Journals of May Sarton Volume One by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504047500
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Death and the Maple

IT HAD NOT OCCURRED TO ME until lately that a house is warmed by death as well as by life. But one day an English friend of mine, brought up in a house that had held many births and many deaths within its sheltering walls, and who had married an American and come to live in his exquisite new house, said, “Yes, it is beautiful. But I shall never feel at home in this house because no one has died here.” My walls hold the death of “Aunt Cora.” I do not brood about it, but I am not unaware that she died here in my study, a frail hunchback who had never been “downed” by a very hard life, and that death is a part of the human richness, the truth of the house for me.

We can accept death. It is dying that is not and never will be acceptable. For us who have to witness dying, it must always feel as if the very fabric of life were being torn apart. I was to experience that cruel tearing two years after I moved in, and in a strange way.

The great maple where the oriole had burst into song on that first day in May was beginning to show the signs of extreme old age. Standing between the house and the wide meadow that separates my grounds from the churchyard, it had looked at first as if it would live forever. It was such a staunch tree, wide at the base, branching low, so it rose up in amplitude, making a wide arc against the sky, “the great tree” of the place. But spring by spring a few more branches failed to leaf out, and in winter it had begun to groan when the icy north winds tore at it. More than once I got up in the night and paced the floor to shut out that sound, the wrenching, long creak and shudder, so much like suffering. What if the huge trunk did crack and the tree crash against the house? I was not alone in my anxiety. Neighbors looked up at it and shook their heads. “Sooner or later that tree will have to come down. It’s a risk.” Yes, sooner or later … I put off the decision because it felt like murder.

But one summer day a truck stopped in the road, two young men got out, knocked at my door, and offered to take it down and cut and stack the wood for fifty dollars. Well, they had come, the messengers of fate, and I made the decision on the spot. But I was not going to watch. I went back to my desk to work, or to try to work. I had not imagined what that day would be like.

The men first got busy with a buzz saw, cutting into the enormous trunk, four feet across at least, representing over a hundred years of growth. Is there a more nerve-racking sound than the hideous, mechanistic screech of a buzz saw at work? It is an anti-sound.

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