The day before the trees came down, I hauled a pile of wooden ladders out of the undergrowth and tried not to think about poison ivy.

I try not to think about a lot of my yard, my home, my self. There’s just too much mess, and try as I might, I can’t seem to keep it all swept up. Even when I do manage to hack back the junk trees and vacuum the living room and floss between my teeth, the weeds and dog hair and plaque always come back before my willpower does.

To some extent, that’s just the experience of being a human in this world. I really am giving it my best. I use a cute little app to remind me to mow the lawn, scoop the cat poop, take my meds. I meet regularly with a therapist who takes my insurance. I dragged the ladders away from the weeds so the tree removers could do their job.

A pair of robins eyed me warily as I shuffled back and forth on that task, wiping cobwebs and desiccated spider corpses off my hands and onto my shorts. One had a dark head and a bright red-orange chest, the other’s colors were grayer, muted. A male and a female. Parents overseeing a nest somewhere nearby?

My own parents have been the ones doing the heavy lifting (literally) at my house lately. The plan is to replace the ancient, leaning garage with a new one at the end of a new concrete driveway (no more mowing the gravel!). While I was comfortably air-conditioned at work, Mom and Dad were gutting the garage, gathering estimates, and even scrubbing the pans that I’d left “soaking” in the sink for lengths of time I won’t admit to here.

My parents have the relentless energy and capability of cartoon superheroes. Dad can master any machine and fix any maintenance mire. Mom can reverse a tornado of mess in minutes and paint a house in an afternoon (to reference The Producers: “Two coats!”).

And me? I can begrudgingly drag a stack of ladders a couple of feet across the yard.

When I finished, I tried to find the nest that the birds were potentially guarding, but the overgrown edges of my yard were too dense to parse. The robins chattered at me from the power lines (that’s them in this essay’s header image) as I strolled the length of my lawn, splitting my attention between the tangled knots of the junk tree canopy and the reaching trios of poison ivy leaves that threatened my bare ankles.

Nothing. If there was a nest, I couldn’t find it. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or concerned. The entire jungle of my backyard was scheduled to be culled first thing in the morning, and if one of the dozens of vine-choked trees secretly housed a huddle of hatchlings, I wanted to mark it off to keep them safe.

So many critter homes were about to be demolished to improve my own home. Just one more thing to feel guilty about.

In the morning, before I could dare snooze my alarm, a fleet of trucks arrived, lining the narrow neighborhood street and releasing a swarm of men in matching helmets and patriotically-themed UV-resistant uniforms.

Arriving alongside them was my mother in a rainbow of gem tones and a twirl of skirt.

“Not this one!” she joked to the men, pointing with both arms to the spruce I planted eight years ago as they laid out chainsaws and harnesses on the lawn. “That’s Spruce Springsteen!”

[Pictured above: Spruce now vs. Spruce when I planted him (and blogged about it) in 2018. Also, all 5’2 of me for scale.]

The men were not in a joking mood. As I scrambled to find places to park cars out of the way, the workers slung weighted lines over the high branches of the nearest doomed walnut. They moved with the swift conviction of a platoon of ants en route to a picnic.

Unfortunately, I had my own work to attend to, so I didn’t witness just how quickly my yard was stripped of its decade or more of overgrowth. My mom and an ever-vigilant neighbor friend reported that the job was completed by the early afternoon. By the time I returned from work, everyone and every tree was gone.

Every tree except for two narrow trunks that twisted around and climbed up each other into a shabby spray of leaves and dying vines. There, nestled in the crux of the bonded trees, sat a nest.

The nest had shreds of plastic dangling from it like sickly-white jellyfish tendrils. There was that guilt again, that the wild animals who share my home are suffering because of my presence, or the general presence of humanity. It’s been a little tough to feel warmly towards mankind lately, after all. But it was a solid nest regardless, and I stood still and quiet to watch as the boldly-painted father robin arrived to feed the brood. A cluster of excited triangles bobbled up to meet him, hungry beaks that had survived the surrounding apocalypse.

The tree-cutters had spared them.

Over the next few days, I occasionally checked on the family, despite being swooped at by the parents. I just wanted to make sure they were still there, still OK. At one point, I worried that one of the parents had become sick. I saw the outline of an adult-sized bird, but it was very still, and its red chest was flecked with black. A quick check online reassured me that this was a healthy juvenile, just about ready to leave the nest.

Which must have happened on a day I didn’t check on them, because the next thing I knew, my dad had returned to cut down the last two trees. He confirmed to me that the nest was empty; the kids had made it, and they’d all moved on.

I was sort of sad to have missed their departure. So much has changed so rapidly. My house looks bald without its cowl of unkempt greenery, and my heart aches for the massive walnut tree that must have been living here since before my great grandparents built the house I now own. When I left for work, that tree towered over my backyard, but when I came home, it was like there was a hole in the sky where its branches were meant to grow.

It’s for the best. This will make my life easier. Happier. I even feel guilty about that. I know the guilt doesn’t help anything, but it adheres to my brain like candle wax on carpet, seeping into every crevice and fiber, hardening by the second. My parents may be superheroes, but I have a superpower too: finding ways to be ashamed about absolutely any- and everything.

For now, the best I can do is meet the guilt with gratitude. I am lucky to have my own pair of robin parents protecting me and my home, even if that home is held together with literal and metaphorical garbage sometimes. I have been spared the overwhelm of navigating all these changes alone. What does it matter if I feel unworthy? The love and support are given freely, generously. I would be rude to reject such a gift.

It will take some time to adjust, but my new view is of a wide and limitless sky, and somewhere in it, young robins are soaring.