I think that I shall never be, a'planting yet another tree — with apologies to Joyce Kilmer
Maybe it was the drought. Maybe it was some kind of bug. Maybe it was just time.
For whatever reason, the largest palo verde behind our house came a cropper a few days ago, toppling completely over.
Oh, there had been warning signs all along. For months, several limbs had gone dead, spreading into the branches.
Yet, parts of the tree had stayed green. We remained hopeful, knowing that nearby palo verdes had done the same thing, only to recover, at least partially, in time.
Not so this one.
"Come out in the back yard and look," said my husband one day after work.
At first, I didn't notice the tree so much as what it no longer hid.
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Where before we'd had privacy, we now saw back walls, a roof, houses across the street.
Even worse was to see this palo verde, once so stalwart, now down on the ground, its roots exposed to the elements.
When those roots first took hold nobody knows, though according to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's Web site, a foothill palo verde can live 200 years.
Imagine. Apaches roamed the land and the Gadsden Purchase was still 48 years away when this palo verde may have sprouted from seed.
It had survived living in Spain, Mexico, the Confederacy and the United States. More important, it had survived the blade of the bulldozer.
One of the reasons we bought this house a decade ago was because the builder had purposely saved as much of the native vegetation as possible.
Ironically, our downed palo verde actually grew, just barely, on our neighbor's property.
After he graciously agreed to get rid of it, our thoughts turned to replacing it, this time on our side of the property line.
Knowing how long it takes a foothill palo verde to reach any kind of heighth, we settled on a hybrid mesquite tree — a big one. As in boxed.
Hey, we're not getting any younger — a fact painfully slammed home when we attempted to move the tree out of the truck once we got it home from the nursery.
"Whomp!" Gravity quickly got it from the tailgate to our driveway.
The next task would be to somehow haul it up the hill next to our house, then scoot it around to the back.
In search of some sort of heavy-duty wheelbarrow, my husband came home from the rental store with something called a "Georgia buggy."
Somewhat resembling a large wheelbarrow with oversized tires, its front end tilted down, which became a great asset when it came time to scoot our tree into its maw.
Trouble was, the whole thing, buggy and tree, weighed what seemed like a ton.
And bear in mind, we had to haul it up a hill. This time, gravity was not our friend. Think Sisyphus and that danged rock.
Admitting defeat, we now had to extricate tree from buggy and figure out once again how to move it.
Turns out, a hand truck we already had in the garage did the trick. Grunting, pulling and pushing, we somehow got the tree to its desired location.
Ahead lay digging a large hole, positioning the tree, filling in the hole and cleaning what seemed like two pounds of mud off of our shoes.
All worth it. The "hole" behind our back wall has been filled again — at least partially — with green leafiness.
I can hardly wait for the birds to move in.
