was halfway through a turkey sandwich at my desk when my sister Mara called. Mara never calls during work hours unless something is seriously wrong—bleeding, burning, or about to turn into a legal problem. I answered with my mouth still full, not bothering with the usual pleasantries.
“Hey, what’s up?”
For a moment all I heard was wind and her breathing, like she’d been running. Like she was standing outside, moving around, trying to process something that her brain was still catching up to.
“You need to come home. Right now.”
There’s a particular tone people use when they’re trying not to panic. I’ve heard it in emergency rooms and police stations. I heard it in my sister’s voice that afternoon.
Tight. Controlled. Just barely holding together.
“What happened?”
“Just come home, Eli. Please.”
I didn’t even shut my computer down properly. I grabbed my keys, muttered something about a family emergency to my manager, and hurried out the door. My office was in Boulder proper, which meant the drive home took me through the city and then up into the foothills—a drive that should have taken thirty-five minutes but that I managed in twenty-eight by driving faster than I should have and running a yellow light that was probably red by the time my car crossed the intersection.
Pine Hollow Road is a narrow two-lane stretch that winds through the foothills. It already makes me uneasy in bad weather, when visibility drops and the turns seem to tighten. That afternoon the sky was perfectly clear—bright blue, birds probably chirping somewhere in the trees, the kind of day that Colorado specializes in. But my stomach felt like it had folded in on itself.
The moment I turned onto my property road, I knew something was wrong before I even saw the specific problem.
Landscapes feel different when something old disappears. It’s like when you take a picture off the wall and can still see the clean square where it used to hang—a ghost of presence, an absence so obvious that it becomes the focal point of the entire room.
The six sycamore trees along the eastern edge of my land were gone.
What I Found When I Got Home
Not damaged by wind. Not trimmed or pruned or partially cut back.
Gone.
They had stood there for decades—thick trunks, tall branches, leaning just slightly toward the sunlight the way trees do when they’re constantly growing toward the light. My father planted three of them when I was eight years old. The other three were added years later, but together they formed a solid green wall that shielded my house from the ridge above—from the view of the houses that had been built up there five years ago, perched like they were surveying the valley below like it belonged to them.
