Shed Fall by Deb Werrlein

I woke from a dream today in which I finished the essay I started yesterday. The kind of finishing that is brilliant in the dream, slightly less brilliant when you wake up. Twisty and nonsensical by the time you finish breakfast. When I opened my eyes, I was in the middle of a thought about an exquisite little tree, telling myself, “It’s called ‘shed fall.’” 

Yesterday, I woke to find several men in my backyard. Hired by a neighbor to fell an oak tree between our houses. A tree that was already a towering beauty when I moved in 26 years ago—a tree fully grown since the 1970s. Builders, electrified by greed, have arrived in our neighborhood to buy our small 1950s-era homes and pulverize them—along with everything else on the property you might call habitat—to make way for the seven-thousand-square-foot boxes these speculators with the maw of their wallets hanging open call homes. My bitterness is palpable and ugly, I know. 

The day before the tree men came, I logged onto Twitter before bed. I saw a tweet that took my breath away. 

My dream tree had leaves of pale green and gold—pretty little ovals with ends pointed like shrapnel. They shimmered as if humming, reflecting light in a halo of gently flashing hues.

I have been working to accept change, waiting for the day when my husband and I can move away without looking back so we won’t see the bulldozers come for the three-bedroom brick rambler where we raised our kids. In the meantime, I assumed the nearby trees and homes were safe. It shocked me to discover my neighbor invited these men, with their ropes and chainsaws, to carve up the thin line of shade between his house and mine. 

The word “tweet” suggests something innocuous— the miniature-noted twittering of a chickadee, the sweet song of a Carolina wren with its upturned copper-colored tale flickering. But then there’s Tweety Bird, always raising the alarm.

I realized the leaves on my dream tree hummed because the tree’s trunk had disappeared. The leaves hung suspended in air, holding their shape as if they didn’t yet understand the trunk’s absence. The effect was the apparition of the missing trunk intimated by the energy of all it had supported—the shade, the spiders and inchworms dangling from their silky threads, the sapsuckers with their beaks still dripping, the robins with their bursting spring nests, the cool greenness breathing oxygen into a hot summer day—all shimmering and humming and exerting themselves into being through these trembling leaves.

After rushing into the corner of my yard to question the men and then calling my neighbor to confirm his intentions, I walked helplessly back to my house where I sat in a kitchen chair and cried. The tears took me off guard, and I told myself to snap out of it. I was supposed to be getting better at accepting change. Why was I falling apart?

The tweet I saw two days ago wasn’t the only one. After I read it, I scrolled to find others then sat at my computer absorbing their thunder. A leaked draft from the Supreme Court indicated real jeopardy for reproductive rights. Like many, I’d expected this, but that didn’t mute the crush of laws on my body. I hadn’t yet absorbed the broader picture—the implications for other privacy-based laws: interracial marriage, gay sex, gay marriage, contraception, trans rights. It was only a draft, but I knew the Court would make it real in a matter of weeks.

In my dream, the shimmering leaves with no tree reminded me of the first seconds of grief, the flash of time between hearing of a loss and the moment your brain understands what it means. You exist in both worlds, knowing but not yet cut by the news. We need time to understand a thing or a person is gone, to realize how the world has changed. In the interim, the old world remains suspended, even though the structure that held it has collapsed. 

I abandoned the kitchen chair, opened files on my computer, and checked my email. But then I thought of how the birds that left their roosts to hunt for food that morning would return to find their nests had disappeared. And I teared up again. 

After learning about the leaked Dobbs opinion, I wanted to drive 20 minutes to DC and camp outside the Court, but I didn’t have a car. Instead, I tweeted about it—a lonely single chirp in a roiling night. 

As I gazed at my dream tree, its halo of leaves intensified, exuding a terrible wrenching beauty—the kind of beauty you see in pictures about grief or death. Like when the light catches the lines of a person’s face and reveals the complexity of what it means to be human. The image filled me with such awe and foreboding I put my dream fingers to my dream forehead and pressed. 

It took those men all day to bring down the tree. I tried to work amid the whine of chainsaws but couldn’t focus. The sections of the massive trunk fell to the earth with such force it literally shook the ground under my chair.

The morning after tweeting about the Court leak, I woke with my head on fire to find the hired tree men in my backyard. When I called my neighbor to ask “why,” he said the tree was flawed by a “twenty-percent lean”—unstable at its core. 

In my dream, the leaves, with their hum and shimmer fell all at once, as if they’d realized simultaneously that their trunk no longer existed. They cascaded down in a diaphanous shower of glassy flecks that ended with a final extinguishing phump. 

Yesterday, I sat at my computer after the earth stopped shaking trying to write an essay about crying all day as the tree came down. I couldn’t make the essay work because I didn’t understand why this particular tree mattered so much. 

Today, I woke from the dream in which I finished the essay I started yesterday. It was the kind of dream that feels brilliant in sleep but gets twisty and nonsensical if you let it sit too long, so I rushed to write it down, formulating an essay about an exquisite little tree in which I told myself, “It’s called ‘shed fall.’”  

Deb Werrlein is a Virginia-based writer and editor. Her flash essays have appeared in Brevity, The Sun, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and others. Her longer work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in a variety of venues, including Creative Nonfiction, Lit Hub, and Mount Hope. 

26 September 2023