That stump sat in my backyard about fifteen years and drove me half crazy the whole time. Old cottonwood I had cut down when it started dropping limbs, and I never got around to pulling the stump. Dulled my mower blades every summer, my grandkids tripped over it chasing the dog. My wife nagged, I put it off, you know how it is. Finally this spring I hired a young fella with a mini excavator to come rip it out. Twenty-minute job, I figured. I figure different now.
He got the machine in there and started digging around the root ball, the way you do. I stood off to the side with my coffee, watching, glad to finally be rid of the thing. Dirt flying, roots snapping. Ordinary as anything.
Then the bucket hooked the main taproot and heaved it up out of the ground. And the young fella killed the engine. Just like that, cut it dead, and the yard went silent, and he pointed down into the hole without saying a word.
I walked over and looked down in there, down under where the roots had been. And I told him to get out of that cab and not call anybody just yet. Because my heart had climbed right up into my throat, and for one terrible second I was sure I knew what we were looking at, the way you just know, the way your whole body goes cold before your head catches up.
It was a box. A small metal box, the kind you would keep in a closet, its lid sprung part way by the roots that had grown right around it and cradled it for who knows how long.
Not what I feared. Not even close. I made myself breathe and I reached down and worked it loose.
Inside, wrapped in a rotted scrap of blanket, was a dogs collar. A little rope toy, gone to threads. A rubber ball. And a piece of paper in a sandwich bag, the ink run but readable, printed in the big careful letters of a child.
Here lies Scout. Best dog in the world. We planted the tree so he would have shade. Please do not dig him up. He was a good boy.
The family before us. They had a boy, and a dog named Scout, and when that dog died they buried him in the yard and planted a cottonwood over him so he would have shade, and asked whoever came next to let him lie. And fifteen years later I brought in an excavator and tore the shade right off him because he was dulling my mower blades.
I felt about two inches tall.
We did it right. My grandkids and I put Scout back in the ground, deep and gentle, the collar and the ball and the note with him. We planted a new tree over the spot, a little redbud, because the cottonwood was gone. And I tracked down that family through the old sale records and told the boy, a grown man now with kids of his own, that Scout was safe, that the new tree was coming in fine, and that I was sorry it took me fifteen years to read his sign.
He cried on the phone. So did I, I do not mind telling you.
The stump is gone. But something better grows there now. And this time, it stays.