Pride goes before a fall, as everyone knows, and some of us know keenly. Spring this year has acquired a sting that forces my thoughts back to last December.
I was sure I’d pulled off something of a home-management coup: For the third year in a row, I’d remembered to schedule the window washers just before Christmas, so the kids would come home to at least the illusion of a sparkling house.
Not only that, but I’d remembered to ask the team from Sonshine Cleaners, while they were at it with their tall ladders, to clean the gutter that runs along the roof at the back of the house — and to cut the magnolia tree back a foot or two, up at the roofline, where unless it’s pruned from time to time it beats against the house. The cuttings — and here’s the stroke of genius — I would use to decorate for Christmas.
In a further, if comparatively trivial, manifestation of managerial prowess, I’d coordinated this operation with my sister, who lives across the street.
So one morning in mid-December, as I left for work, I stopped by my sister’s house to have a word with the team from Sonshine (not an immigrant misspelling, by the way, as I first assumed, but a religious affirmation). They would move over to my house when they finished up at hers.
I greeted the men and did the best I could, in skimpy high-school Spanish, to remind them about cleaning the gutter and cutting back the tree. I told them I’d left the clippers out; and they should leave the cuttings on the ground. Then I sashayed off to work — I admit it — feeling rather smug. The kids were getting home that night.
They came, bringing a Christmas tree and youthful appetites and ushering in a whirl of guests and outings that kept me busy during my ensuing week off, so that I never took the time to step outside and examine my tree.
I did notice that there were an awful lot of clippings in our small backyard, even whole branches. The heap, in fact, was easily knee-high, far more than I remembered from previous years, and far more than I could use. But I enjoyed supplying magnolia cuttings to friends and neighbors. The huge shiny leaves grow in clusters that make for sumptuous ready-made centerpieces and adornments for mantels and doors, and I was happy to share my bounty.
Only after the hubbub of Christmas had subsided did I go out and inspect. My tree had been hacked to pieces.
Not uniformly so. The men had concentrated their well-intentioned efforts on the lower branches and near the house. Precisely the parts of the tree that gave me constant pleasure all year — shading the patio and providing a dense, dark, Henri Rousseau jungle outside my bathroom window; projecting patterned shadows at night onto the linen closet door — have been devastated. The window looks out now onto scrawny stumps. Long branches that once reached almost to the verandah — so that in June, when the Magnolia Grandiflora justifies its name and the air is drenched with perfume from giant creamy blossoms that from a distance look like popcorn, I used to be able to lean over the balustrade and pick a flower for the table — those branches are gone.
So this spring, I am quietly in mourning. On my walks to and from the Metro, I scrutinize the front gardens I pass, stirring with life, and wonder how much new growth my tree will see this year. Some, surely. But I don’t fool myself. What was cut down in an hour last December took many years to grow. About thirty years ago, I’m told, the previous owners of my house planted that tree from a seed.
Needless to say, my pretensions to managerial competence also lie in ruins. Too late, I realize, looking back, that my instructions to the window washers had met with blank stares. I’d failed to notice that the men were unfamiliar, a new crew who’d never been to my house before. My Spanish wasn’t the only reason for their incomprehension.
Now, I am full of fine resolves about never again blithely delegating a task whose proper execution matters in the least. But I’m far too chastened to imagine my resolves are worth much. I doubt I’ll ever again so much as toy with the idea that I could be, Martha Stewart-like, on top of things.
CLAUDIA WINKLER
