Trees add beauty to a community

There is something so sad to me when I see a beautiful tree being cut down. The other day I heard a buzz saw running doing something and I went to the window to see why it was running. To my surprise I saw this huge truck with a really long crane already raised and a workman starting the ending of that particular tree. I don’t know why it was being eliminated. It was near the Erie Canal but that didn’t have any interference that I could see but the canal had something to do with the crane being so high up in the air.

Last year about this time a large full grown cedar was cut down. It was near our barn and the lady who was having it taken down was fearful that it would go down with all the high winds that we have had in the past couple of years. This cedar was even taller than the one this week, but cedars are known for not having deep roots and are easily blown down.

Cutting down trees is quite an attraction for people walking by — they always draw an audience. Traffic is sometimes detoured and this was the case the day with many bystanders looking on but with blockage quite a distance for safety purposes.

At our house many years ago now, we had a huge elm tree which had inherited the Dutch elm disease that hit Canastota and one by one the elm trees were eliminated at the time, the only answer to rid the community of the disease. This tree had been in front of our house long before we ever arrived. The trunk was really large around and in the side of it was a chain embedded back in the days when horses were the mode of travel. At the end of the chain was still the part that was fastened to the horse or wagon when people tethered their transportation. I wasn’t around when the stump was taken up so that you could have counted the rings to see how old it was.

I felt real bad as did others in the neighborhood when it came down. It’s almost like killing a life. How many years it takes for a tree to grow that high and it still would have been there had it not become infected.

This was many years ago and still to this day each spring the ground where it stood settles and has to be built up again with more soil.

To this day we have never been able to replace the tree with another tree. We have set out maples and other types of shade trees which we certainly missed when the other one was taken down, but somehow never taking root. It’s as if the other tree never wanted another one to live there. I said that once to my mom and she told me I was just too sorry about the elm and I was being superstitious.

Reading this I’m sure there are many who have had the same feelings about an elimination of a growing subject that provides the oxygen for us and our planet.