When my father married my mother he told her of his plan to plant a willow tree. My mother, a superstitious, person asked him not to. She said that once the tree got large enough to cover your grave, you’d die.
My father didn’t plant the tree.
Years later my mother did die and my father remarried. His new wife planted a willow tree. When it grew large enough to cover her grave, she died.
Seven or eight months later on a summer evening I came home from my job, the air was clear and the sky lovely, and I heard my father chopping down the willow tree. I asked him why he’d done it. He merely responded “there was a problem in the roots”. He was right, the problem was in the roots, the problem was in my father’s roots.
