The Old Tree, Part One.

It was a late winter's evening, cold and dry with the faint smell of spring in the air. That would be the trees exuding some kind of pre-flower woodiness from their buds, waxing in the night air. The smell I had loved as a child, and was still here to welcome me at the old ancestral home.

I had given my mother her evening pill cocktail; one of everything. I had warmed her milk and spooned honey into it and stirred it, and we had sat for a while and she swallowed her pills with the milk. No trouble there. Ninety-three and doesn't look a day over a hundred. Long grey hair (she never cut it), a sculptured face vaguely suggesting the beauty she once was, and old pale skin as smooth as paper.

I left her snoozing on her old chair made more comfortable by about twenty cushions and pillows and a couple of old tartan rugs. Sheer luxury. Locking the back door, I noticed it was darker than it should have been at that time. I stared into the distance, down towards the end of the garden, past the old garage overgrown with ivy, and the small outbuilding that my father built in 1967 as a cubby for the children but then later turned into a darkroom and art studio. The clothesline at the bottom of the garden was invisible. Odd. I looked up to see a shadow looming over the garden halfway back towards the house. I walked towards it. It was a tree: a massive trunk that had fallen but was only halfway down its drop, obviously suspended on something; a shed, another tree, what? I tried to get under it. Its main spar was at 45 degrees, resting directly on the apex of the clothesline's wire pyramid, but some of its spreading branches were caught up in other trees nearby.

I went back inside; gently woke my mother and told her not to go into the back garden, or near the tree, until I could return in the morning and examine the damage. And somehow bring it down so it wouldn't fall suddenly and kill someone.