The old oak trees at the Playhouse are dying. By the end of last summer, two of them stood bare and leafless. We lost another one in the winter. Yesterday, the three of them were cut down and their remnants hauled way.

A few months ago I began listening to The Tolkien Professor, Corey Olsen, on iTunes U. I’ve been working my way through his lecture series on J.R.R. Tolkien‘s works (and enjoying it tremendously!). Yesterday as I listened to the chain saws buzzing and the crack of boughs being cut from their lifeless trunk, I recalled a section of one of Olsen’s lectures with which I truly identified. After reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings countless times, you don’t look at trees the same way. Trees become characters. They become living creatures with lives of their own. I can honestly say that I felt pangs of grief as the old oaks were cleared away, and more pangs of grief as I realized that what little life is left in the remaining oak trees is quickly waning.

Those trees had shaded the old Playhouse. My daughters grew up running around them and playing under their shade. They were part of the place like old friends standing sentinel while we went about our lives beneath their watch. They were friends. The lawn looks so empty and bare without them.

Today Wendy and I will visit a local nursery and start the process of contemplating new trees to plant and watch grow up around us.

Old things pass away. New things come.

C’est la vie.