The council cut down our trees

It is almost 4am and I can't sleep. I haven't slept for more than a couple of hours since Friday, when three men with chainsaws cut down the forty year old trees on the road outside my home. 

When I first heard the roar of the machines I was rocking my 5 month old to sleep at the back of the house. I assumed I was hearing the usual maintenance works on the road, and didn’t look to see what what going on. Then the noise grew louder, waking the baby. We went to the front door and I was shocked to see our beloved sycamore dismembered, another magnificent tree across the road reduced to a weeping stump. I wrapped my baby in a blanket and ran outside, shouting I don't remember what, but the men put down their chainsaws. One of them came to talk to me while the others took a break--he was drinking from a takeaway coffee cup, like what he was doing was the most normal thing in the world.

He told me the council has employed them to cut down all the trees, that they weren't “suitable” for a residential estate. It's a quiet cul-de-sac of 20 detached houses built in the 70s, most of them still occupied by the original owners, getting on now. My daughter is named after the neighbour who minded me after school as a child, who died of cancer when I was a teenager. Everyone here has known me since I was a baby, and shared in the excitement of bringing Margot home for the first time. It was in many ways a perfect place to grow up, and I was so happy my daughter's first experiences of the world would happen on the same leafy streets.

I pleaded with the man with the coffee cup to leave the tree, that he could tell the council a crazy woman with a baby stood in his path, that he had no choice.  He sighed and told me he would leave one today, but that they would be back.  

So I stood in the street in the cold with my baby, sobbing, while the trees came down.  40 years of life and growth snuffed out in a matter of minutes. The stumps left behind are the height of a countertop, the width of a grown man.  The roots fill the footpath verges; nothing will ever grow here again.  

I have spent the weekend in mourning; watched the shocked faces of neighbours coming home from work to be greeted by the loss.  The winter sunlight in the house is garish, unfiltered, I keep the blinds half drawn. I feel like I have lost half my community, but there are no funerals to attend, no opportunity to pay tribute to the life and the relationships we had.  I wish I had taken more photos, I wish I had done more to save them. 

Since having my baby I have withdrawn from the wider world in a way that’s felt right and natural to me.  The news isn’t just depressing, it’s embarrassing. We have a few short decades left as a species living comfortably on this planet, and all the buffoons and blowhards can talk about are border walls and Brexit.  I’ve retreated to my childhood home with my little family, but you’re never safe when bad ideas are the order of the day.

It is some reprieve to write this morning. Perhaps it will make someone pause before they get out the chainsaw.  It takes an afternoon to repair a cracked pavement, it takes a lifetime to grow a tree.