One of the reasons we bought this house is because of the beautiful spruce tree that stood at the side of the front yard and commanded awe. It was about 60 ft tall and at least 50 years old. I liked to just sit under it sometimes. It fell silently during the horrible blizzard last week and when we saw it hours later laying across the yard, our hearts were broken. Strangely, the night before it fell, a woman we had never seen before came to the door and asked if she could gather some cones from beneath it. We joke that she must have put a hex on it since no other tree in our area fell. Anyway, we asked the tree guy to let us have the mulch from it so now the beautiful tree is just a memory, we are $1000 poorer and we have a mountain of mulch six feet high. The only thing that feels OK about all this is that it had the grace not to fall on a person, house or car.