By Stella Seifried
Edited by Liam Mason and Alloe Mak

This morning, the tree in my backyard fell over, crushing my neighbour’s garage and blocking our laneway. It was a fifty-foot oak that used to hold up my childhood treehouse and a tire swing. We didn’t know it was rotting—I didn’t hear it fall. Apparently, it rattled houses and sounded like fireworks. I slept soundly, safely in my bed despite the fact that if the tree had fallen the other way I could have been crushed. Fate can be gentle. Fate can be safe. 

I’ve been wondering how long this tree has been there because I can’t remember a time before it. This tree was here when we moved in—it had already grown against two other large oaks, roots clustered together in the soil, branches tangled in the sky. My siblings and I used to chase each other around the trunks, peeking our heads through the gaps where the trees separated. The three of us always had our toes stuck in the dirt and palms upturned to the sun. If you had asked us then, we would have told you that tree would live forever. 

I used to watch the leaves turn amber and pumpkin. I used to watch the branches sway during snow storms and sag under perfect droplets of frozen rain. The branches of these three oaks were a canopy to us our whole childhood, under which, I was hit in the face by my sibling’s tennis racket, threw balls for my now-dead dog, picked bluebells, and wished on dandelion fluff. Now the other two trees have to be taken down, too, and no shade will be left.

There are hundreds of hundred-year-old oak trees in my neighbourhood, why was this tree—my tree—the one that had to fall? 

This tree fell on my baby brother’s twelfth birthday, and he seems to think that has something to do with it. Maybe he’s right. Perhaps from the day it sprouted, it was meant to fall the day we were all no longer babies. Maybe it was supposed to fall with our childhood. 

Fate is specific and random. You can’t glue a fourth leaf onto a clover and expect it to give you anything—we can’t make our own luck. Fate is fickle and unforgiving. You can’t grow roots into soft soil and expect them to hold you up for a hundred years. 

Fate isn’t changeable and it isn’t lucky. Fate makes us feel insignificant—it drops acorns onto the path we walk bare-footed. It dictates the changes that we think we have control over. A new fridge, a different dog, a new car, and a treeless yard; my life no longer resembles the one of my childhood, but that’s fate, isn’t it? 

I think I hold what I have closer to my tender heart now knowing that it was always meant for me and that it won’t last forever. Like hand-me-down shoes and orange peels, subway rides across the city and wire earbuds, and oak trees and childhood.