Easter

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. The high point of the Christian calendar. The day we celebrate life over death, grace over sin, immortality over decay and corruption.

This is the time of new beginnings, new hope.

We’ve had a very large tree in our yard all the years we have lived here. It was forked at the bottom, splitting into two trunks that were each over two feet wide. I understand it’s the type of tree from which Solomon built the first temple, often called a cedar of Lebanon, though it isn’t like any sort of cedar we know of in the northwest. Its wood is stronger, denser. It was, to me, just some sort of pine tree.

One of the trunks was growing over our house. Its angle and size showed it would someday prove a danger to our home. We knew it would have to come down.

My brother knows a guy who handles large trees, and taking down this one was a very small job for him. It was his company which removed a large portion of that grove of trees where the owl at the cemetery lived, the one who has been gone for months now. I think “Joe the Tree Guy” agreed to do it for $700 more as a favor to my brother than anything else. He said we can take as long as we want to pay him. The deal was he would chip and haul off the small branches, cut the remainder into firewood length, and leave it for us to clean up.

Pretty good deal. A friend and I rented a hydraulic splitter to handle all that wood. We were surprised how five hours of hard steady work by two adults and two teens (and Brenda and Jeremiah pitching in for the final hour and a half) weren’t enough to get it all split. I finished it up over the next week by hand with wedges and a maul.

It generated about two and a half cords of wood for our wood stoves.

My friend took a pickup truck full. We stacked the rest in the backyard.

The front yard looks, feels, naked without that tree. I’m sorry to cut down anything so beautiful. But it threatened our home, it had to come down.

A couple of weeks ago I planted a peach tree between that stump in the yard and the street. It is located where it will get plenty of light, have enough room from the driveway, and grow back into some sort of privacy barrier again.

It has already begun to bud flowers.

That’s one of the great things about living in the Willamette Valley here in Oregon. Spring hits with a vigorous verdant explosion. The daffodils and tulips spring up, the grass grows a dark green so quickly it seems you can almost see it moving.

There’s no school on Monday as it is the beginning of Spring Break. It seems appropriate for Spring Break to start (this year anyway) the day after Easter.

I’m taking the boys to the coast for a couple of days, using some sort of hotel credit card points we have accumulated over the past few years.

While we are gone Brenda will be moving her stuff out of our home and into her boyfriend’s house.

I have taken my wedding ring off my left hand and placed it on my right.

I spent some time in the Prayer Room this morning. I wrote tiny letters of praise and scripture and pleas for help in the shirt the carpenter is wearing in the image I’m sketching on the wall.

I’ve shed a few tears, but I feel a sense of relief that things are moving on.

I told Brenda that I will still be taking her mother to church on Sundays. She loves the sense of community she gets from attending our church, and even though we are divorcing, she is still the grandmother to my children and I do not wish to take that from her.

My mother wrote me a letter, and followed it up with a phone call last night. She is a gifted artist in Southern California. She has had a vision for a new painting, a man running a race, crowds on either side. He has my face.

She says she does not know what has been going on (I haven’t told her) but she says she senses I have been going through trials these past few months.

The pine tree is gone, given its life over to warm us in coming winters. The peach tree has been planted, and already promising fruit, though it only stands three feet tall.

My heart aches. But it is Spring, a time for new beginnings.

It is Easter.

He is risen.