As a college student, when driving into North Carolina to visit friends and relatives, I had a tinge of envy. This state has multitudes of wooded areas with the tall and slender pines I have admired. Always green, the pines hold an elegance no tree can quite match. Now a North Carolina resident myself, I’ve learned something else about the pine – it has a cold and ferocious enemy. Ice.

The sight along Durham Freeway the other morning after the December Ice Storm of 2002 was a sad one. “There’s one.”

“Look, another.”

My husband, children and I exchanged sorrow-filled utterances from the frosty van windows. Snapped at the trunks, dozens of these pines looked like broken pencils. Some had been uprooted and lay spread out over roads.

Other trees hold the same enemy. As we entered our own Durham neighborhood, we saw that the limbs of pear and maple trees had split under the weight of the ice.

Later, I heard the distant sound of a chain saw.

My husband used a saw powered by only his arm. Slowly, painfully, he cropped off the torn limbs of our weeping willow. The ice broke five major limbs. I sat by the computer, grateful for the power that was restored to us two days after the storm, afraid to see what the outcome of that significant tree's surgery would be.

Days ago I stood looking at the tree and accessing the damage. A neighbor was observing, too. "That weeping willow has something to cry about now," he commented. "So sad."

He is a new neighbor, not knowing that the tree was planted in sorrow. It is my son Daniel's tree, bought and planted in his memory, after his death in the winter of 1997. It has flourished from six-feet, into a gracious and sweeping twelve-foot beauty of nature.

"It's my favorite tree in the whole neighborhood," another neighbor told me as I again counted the broken limbs.

Iced over, brought down, its limbs blocked the driveway door, trapping our van inside. Days after the storm, my kids and neighbors lovingly shook off the tubes of ice surrounding each branch. Lifting the branches closest to the garage door while standing on ladders, they made it possible, my dear neighbors, for me to back the van out of the garage.

I hoped the morning sun of the next day would help the remaining branches lift upwards on their own. But although de-iced, the weeping willow still drooped.

Thinking my husband had finished cutting off the lifeless branches, I swallowed and got up from the computer. Opening the front door I set my eyes on the tree. It had been shorn. Five of those round and healthy branches that used to provide shade in the summer and had once given the tree an aura of majesty were now on the ground. My husband was sawing the branches into firewood.

“It’s going to live,” my husband told me. My mind rewound to five years ago when I so desperately wanted someone in the hospital to tell me those words about my son. I had held his bloated body, weak from cancer treatments and an infection, wanting to breathe life into his limbs. If this tree died, this tree planted in my four-year-old’s memory, how long would I blame myself?

Under the Expanded Sky

Educating Merna

Crying With My Ancestors

Opening Grief as a Gift

Living Life from the Graveyard

Surviving the Tinsel

Is There Laughter After Death?

Whatever Happened to the Old?

Out of My Comfort Zone

I Am Not Cheese

As The Sixth Year Approaches

The Dirty Green Van

Judging Pain?

Grief Meets the Answering Machine

Closets, Revisited

Unwinding with a Pen

There is Nothing Wrong with You!

Scared to Death of Dying and Denying Grief

The Night the Christmas Tree Fell

Baking Bereavement Bread

For the Love of Mothers

Bereaved Eyes

A Wealthy Life

The Power of Photographs

Fragrance of Marigolds

A week has nearly passed now; only patches of ice and snow remain; yet many of my friends still have no power in their homes. At the vet, at the car repair shop, the conversations hover around the ice storm. A woman from India says she has only been here six months and never seen anything like this.

“I worry about the damage to all the trees,” I say. She has heard that as long as tree roots were not destroyed, come spring, the trees will be an array of green leaves.

That afternoon I stand again at my weeping willow, the seared bare branches still making some place in my heart fill with sadness. What can I do for you? I wonder as I press its long tendrils between my cold fingers. I hate to be powerless. I hope the rest of the winter will be kind. For now I can only dream of green and growth in spring.