An Article I Am Writing

There’s a tree on (nth) street that is dying.

I passed under it one day while walking between my parked car and the moving truck I was renting one hot day in July this year.

It’s lush, green leaves were beginning to curl inward and I got the sense that it was struggling more than it should be in this kind of hot weather, being as it was many years successfully established with a lovely array of limbs arching.

It seemed to me that it needed water badly, and it turned out that landscapers had recently removed the weed roots that used to cover its own roots (likely goring its top feeder roots in the process) and then moisture-sucking “bark” was spread all over the now stripped dirt’s surface.

I kept having to walk past it throughout the month while moving slowly from my apartment, and I began to water it a little about every other evening to try to give it a boost if hydration.

Sometimes, when I had finished pouring three to four gallons of water evenly in a easy ring around its roots, the wind would suddenly pick up and the tree’s branches and leaves would rustle – as if it or the wind itself were thanking me.

The day came when at last I was finished moving and I asked the shop employees at the three shops nearesr it if they could inform their employers and take over giving the tree more water that it needed to ensure its recovery.

One shop furmly refused; another shop’s employee listened, bemused and barely responsive; and the one directly in front’s desk reo humored me by coming out to see – but apparently, no one has done much of anything.

Nature seems to be an asset, only when it self redeems.

So I kept going by occasionally after hours, still trying to give it at least “sips” of water to keep going and get through summer, even though its leaves began steadily declining.

And now, tbis evening of September 3rd on the half moon when fall should soon be approaching with the promise of much needed rain, the tree’s leaves are beginning to brown in its life’s retreat as they whither in defeat.

And I ask the community: is it just so easy to let a life go, fleeting?

(It is positioned between the street and sidewalk, so I think technically it falls under public domain.)