While we were away

This weekend we went to a family wedding and today we arrived back home. We were sitting having lunch and I looked out the window and immediately noticed a spindly tree was gone.

I blogged about this tree two and a half years ago, after it had just lost part of itself following a couple windy days. The photo I took back then is at left. It stayed looking like that, more or less, ever since then. Now it’s completely gone.

When we first moved into this house, back before my blog began, I used to look out at that tree as a way to rest my eyes when working on the computer. After that 2007 damage, it looked different, but it also became a regular perch for quite a few birds, including an amorous pair that used to snuggle (and more…) on one of the branches, like in the photo below, for example. I mentioned the birds’ amorous adventures as they happened on a live podcast I did back in July 2009, a few days before the photo below was taken.

Other birds used to stop on that tree, too. They probably visited other trees nearby, but this was the only one with a tree branch I could see clearly from the window over my desk. The lush bush view outside my window is nice, but I liked the bird visits, so my view has suddenly become a bit less interesting.

That spindly tree was what I call a “junk tree”, weak, easily damaged in storms and not very interesting to look at. But even something like that, seemingly with so little going for it, was still really interesting. There’s an allegory to the way we look at people in that, but I really am just talking about a tree, and about noticing things that happened while we were away.