I was gardening when the storm hit.

The wind picked up, and the sky darkened. I straightened up from the weeds in the dirt and looked southwards over the horizon. Clouds in dusky blue and grey and black swooped low between the fields and the sun. The branches on the trees rustled, and then bent and creaked, and then started to break.

For as long as I have been alive, there’s been an ancient maple tree standing gaurd by the road at the end of the driveway of my parents’ house. It stands comfortably in the shade of the Austrian Pine, and must be almost as old. It is covered in mushrooms and moss and green flakes of lichen. The soft bark is rough, with a texture like crumpled paper, deep creases full of shadows where bugs burrow and the spiders make their webs. The middle of the trunk is hollow, which provided shelter for several generations of honey bee hives and bird’s nests.

Once in a while we used to drill a small hole in the side of the tree in the spring, to collect the sap we boiled down into syrup. The smell of sap bubbling in a big pot beside the porch is the essence of nostalgia. If I could bottle that and take it with me, I could get back to my childhood any time I liked. There were small round scars in the bark, healed over.

When I was maybe four or five years old, my dad carved my first initial into a walking stick made from one of its branches. The walking stick, made for a child, is too small for me now.

When I was six or seven, I waited alone with my backpack for the schoolbus in a windstorm and leaned against the tree so that my tiny body wouldn’t blow away.

When I was nine, ten, eleven, I would sit on the swing of the next tree down and marvel at the strength of this new internal monologue which was beginning to chatter inside my head. It was powerfully distracting. I could sit in the shade of the maples in the grass, feel the wind in the warmth of the summer, but a part of me was carried off somewhere else and has never quite managed to find its way back.

When I was fourteen, fifteen, I leaned against the tree waiting for the same schoolbus in the mornings. My hair was longer then, and I used to wash it in the morning, so it would freeze into ropes in the cold in the winter. Depending on the season, I would watch the sunrise. After school I used to sit on the front porch and play guitar and try to write songs that felt grown up and profound, and if I couldn’t think of the next lyric I’d look up at the blue hills and the sky. The comforting, familiar shape of that tree would be there in the foreground, like an afterthought in a Bob Ross painting.

When I was sixteen, seventeen, I would wait for the bus and lean against the tree and drink hot coffee from a travel mug. I was probably thinking about whichever boy happened to seem interesting at the time, or whichever girl I couldn’t stop thinking about because I thought I was jealous of her perfect eyes and hands and smile and sense of humor and her brilliance and her charm. Sometimes I am slow on the uptake. The leaves on the maple tree rustled in the breeze, laughing.

When I was eighteen, and then nineteen, I learned how to drive in a busted jeep and every time I backed out of the driveway I would carefully look over my shoulder to make sure not to hit that tree on my way out.

For my whole life, each time I got back to the house and pulled into the driveway, that tree would be there to greet me, and that’s how I’d know I was home.

I was gardening when the storm hit, and I was a mile away from home working for a neighbor. The wind picked up. I stood and watched the storm roll in across the fields, a wall of wind and thundering clouds and rain rushing towards us at great speed, and I felt my own smallness and fragility in the face of the raw power of the weather. Part of me wondered if this is what it’s going to feel like at the end of the world.

A text from dad: “don’t drive until this is over.”

We ducked into the house and waited it out. Anything that was not tied down was thrown about everywhere. The father told stories of other storms, and his son moved around the kitchen and listened to music because he is far too old (and much too young) to listen to his father’s stories.

And so I wasn’t at home when the maple tree went down.

She split across the middle at her weakest point. It was a clean break. All the branches still bearing leaves have been severed from the roots they have nourished for decades. It’s over and done.

When I got back I leaned against what’s left of her and cried.