Last week we had to cut down the water oak in our front yard. It was unbearable hearing and feeling it come down, limb by limb, part by part, thud after thud after thud.

Water oaks in cities last only about fifty to sixty years. I keep wondering if this tree was exactly my age. It is is strange to remember that twenty years ago, shortly after we moved in, when my friend Blondeau scaled this tree and hung a swing from its main bough, it was only a little over thirty years old. It was not an old tree, then.

Susan and I are coping with the loss by focusing on the tree we will plant in its place. We considered many varieties until we remembered the first story from Richard Powers’s The Overstory, which revolved around the devastation of the American Chestnut in the first half of the twentieth century.

This weekend we went to the Ace in Decatur to look at trees. On our way home we passed what we thought looked like a chestnut tree. We saw nuts on the sidewalk. We circled the block and pulled over to investigate. It turned out to be a Chinese Chestnut. We picked up a handful of nuts and took them home, where we cooked and ate them. They were tiny heavenly potatoes.

We are now obsessing over planting a Dunstan Chestnut. I would love to find a two-and-a-half year old sapling.