The Old Tree Part Two: Forty-five degrees and falling.

I returned the next morning. She'd been up early. She had not listened to my advice. She was not in the house.

Surely not. I pushed open the back door, stepped down the ramp and passed the old vine-covered garage and the long-abandoned art studio. There was something moving in the deeply shadowed patch under the spread of the downed canopy that now hung dangerously.

The moving thing was her, under the clothesline, pegging out smalls in the darkness of a virtual jungle, a sixty-foot trunk looming over the top like the fuselage of a crashed airliner.

I drew her out gingerly, like a soldier carrying an injured buddy out of a minefield. When we were back in clear sunlight I asked her if she'd forgotten what I'd told her last night.Oh, no, she said. But it's perfectly safe, she added. It would have come down by now. Anyway, it's a good drying morning. I trundled her and her walker inside and told her not to come out again.

The tree had been some African type; purple flowers, olive green leaves, smooth bark, tall, spreading growth. Its dead trunk had been the framework for a riot of jasmine which over the decades had almost overgrown it. Now, the rootball was clear out of the ground. But the trunk had been held at forty-five degrees by ropes of the jasmine, whose twirled coaxial cables, anchored to the back fence in four different places, were rock-hard and dead straight in straining to hold the trunk, like ropes on a sailing ship hard to the wind. So far the ropes were winning.