Family's ash tree had a rich life

I counted something like 50 rings.
That would be about right if the ash tree behind our house dates from around 1965.
It was about that time that Lou and Eula Wasmuth remodeled the house, adding on a section to the west and another bit to the south to make the place more congenial for the two of them and their adult son Alex, who was coping with a degenerative disease that affected his ability to walk.
In its youth, the ash tree stood beside an area where there was a barrel for burning trash. That’s what was done in 1965. Households burned their trash on a regular basis. There was no recycling to speak of, except for scrapyards. And there was no landfill. There was a city dump, a place just as bad as the name implies.
By the time we bought the house from the Wasmuths in 1981, all that had changed. And the ash tree soon found that it was beside a swing set for our daughters. We’d bought the set from some of our neighbors down the street. Their kids had used it, and judging from the heftiness of the steel it was constructed from, it’s safe to say there had been other kids before that.
With help from my buddy Jim Klopfenstein, the swing set found a new home beside the ash tree. He borrowed a Klopfenstein’s Hardware pickup truck, and I rode in the bed with the swingset, trying to keep it steady.
Over time, of course, both the ash tree and our three daughters kept growing. And while the tree remained, the swing set was sold at a garage sale to another family whose young kids were hungry for it.
Fifty years that tree stood on that spot. In the course of its life, America saw a parade of presidents: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama. And our children grew to adulthood, built careers, fell in love and started families of their own.
But this month, the ash tree came down.
The invasion of the emerald ash borer did it in. Last spring, it looked bad. The bug was doing what the ice storm of 2005 had failed to do. We held off in 2014 because there were a handful of branches that showed some signs of life. By this spring, however, we knew it had to come down.
Almost no branches leafed out, and we could see the telltale bark damage of the ash borer high up in the tree. The tree was trying valiantly to stay alive; little green sprouts popped out here and there on the trunk. But it was futile.
The backyard is sunnier now, and the house will be hotter in summer without the shade the ash tree provided. But the sunshine has its advantages.
The patch where the ash tree once stood turns out to be a perfect place to plant a tree. Let’s hope the new tree has a life as long and rich as the one it’s replacing.