Seeing the forest, missing one tree

This is a rebroadcast. I didn't take my camera today when we walked in Whatcom Falls Park, where I noticed (a while ago now) a stump where this tree once stood. Maybe one of you Bellinghamsters know what happened to it? My mom and I always remarked on the shape and feel of this trunk, damaged, I guess, by its loss of bark?

I am also seeing the forest above my Ridgemont neighborhood home being "thinned" to the point of clear cut. Not all of it, but enough to decimate a whole half-mile path I used to walk up there. I love early morning sunlight hitting my east-facing back deck, but now I get too much of it, all that the trees used to collect and hold in their branches. Alas. Development is inevitable. Someday I might enjoy walking through new neighborhoods up there, but as Auden says in a poem about the possibility of being able to appreciate a sky with no stars, "this might take me a little time."

It was a beautiful fall morning at the park in any case. We beat the rain.