I hollered to my wife to stay back because I did not know yet what I was looking at, tangled down in those broken roots, and my mind went to the dark place any mind goes. Then I got close, and I got my phone out, not to call anybody, but to take a picture, and then to wave my wife over instead of away, because it was not a dark thing at all. It was the most beautiful thing.
It was a glass jar, sealed tight with wax, and inside was a photograph, a wedding portrait, a young man and a young woman in the stiff clothes of a hundred years ago. And a thin gold band. And a folded letter.
The couple in the photograph had planted our oak. On their wedding day, in 1921, a young bride and groom had planted a little sapling in the yard of the house they were starting their life in, and they had buried a jar at its roots, and in it they put their wedding portrait, a spare ring, and a letter, so that as the tree grew tall and strong over the decades, it would grow up over the beginning of their marriage.
We planted this tree the day we were wed, the letter said, so that our love would have roots and reach for the sky. If you are reading this, the tree grew, and so, we hope, did the love.
For a hundred years that oak grew up over their vows. My kids swung from it. My daughter got married under it, never knowing another bride had planted it on her own wedding day a century before. The whole backyard lived in its shade all summer long, and down under its roots, the whole time, lay the buried heart of the marriage that started it.
My wife and I stood in that raw crater and read the letter out loud, and I do not mind telling you we held onto each other and cried, two people married thirty years, over two people married a hundred years ago who loved each other enough to plant a tree and bury a promise under it.
I found their family, in the end. The couple were long gone, of course, but their great-grandchildren were not far off, and they wept to hold a wedding portrait of ancestors they had only ever heard about. The tree that grew over their family beginning had finally, in falling, handed it back to them.
I grieved that oak like an old friend. I still do. But I understand now that it was never just a tree. It was a marriage, planted young, that grew a hundred feet tall and shaded four generations, and when the storm finally took it down, it gave up the love that had been holding it up all along. We are planting a new one this spring. And we are burying a jar at its roots.