A Fading Tree, Once Majestic, Had to Come Down. But It Wasn’t the End. An old, beloved sugar maple on a Pennsylvania farm slowly succumbed to disease. Today, it lives on in a new form.

A Fading Tree, Once Majestic, Had to Come Down. But It Wasn’t the End.

An old, beloved sugar maple on a Pennsylvania farm slowly succumbed to disease. Today, it lives on in a new form.

Corey Snyder, a wood turner in Pennsylvania, cut sections of a felled sugar maple.

When you live a long time with trees, they become a part of you.

So it pained me to take down the old sugar maple, my arboreal cathedral, one rafter at a time, her demise not from flames but an underground blaze of fungus.

Small honey-colored mushrooms fruiting at her base were “the giveaway,” said the forester......

She still had not revealed her age, though. I had hoped I could count her rings, but she was so scuffed up with a kaleidoscope of chain saw marks that it was impossible to do so.

Cutting the tree into smaller pieces; maplewood bowls, one with a bark inclusion, made by Mr. Snyder; the grain of one of the bowls; sections of tree ready to be carted away.

Yet when I walk out to the side yard, I still see her standing, her long, elegant branches reaching skyward. It is autumn now and there is no longer that colorful array of red, yellow and orange leaves blanketing the ground beneath her. And last spring, I strained to hear the dawn chorus.

That glorious sound is not as close to the house as it once was, not as vibrant. It emanates from branches farther away, from trees closer to the forest. The birds that once called the old maple home have had to move on, to sing elsewhere. So must I.