Joe and Peggy Willis look up at the tree before it was cut. (Rick Russell Photo)
Overcome with memories, Peggy Willis watched as the state came and cut down her large balsam fir tree and began to cry.
She remembered when her youngest daughter, April, used the tree as home base for kickball games with her older siblings.
She remembered when her exhusband, Leslie Dyer, would tell their three daughters, “Leave the tree alone, don’t grab,” she said.
Dyer, an avid outdoorsman, planted the tree beside their house in 1979. It grew to more than 50 feet tall and weighed 3,200 pounds after it was chopped down.
Last week, Willis and her family donated it to the state to be the Christmas tree at the State Capitol. It was lifted by a crane and transported to Montpelier. On Thursday it was lit for Dyer and April, father and daughter, who died a few years apart.
*
April, 35, died when she choked at a friend’s birthday party in Woodstock. Dyer, 65, died of bladder cancer in August.
April was close to her father.
They both liked the outdoors and gardening. They told stories, fished and played games. April helped her father, who had polio, stack wood for the winter.
She and her longtime boyfriend Clifford Wheeler and their son Calob, now, 17, used to watch the television show “Survivor” every Wednesday and they took turns making meals for each other.
April was the “spitting image of her father,” Wheeler said.
“They (got) their mind set on something they got to do it today, can’t do it tomorrow,” Wheeler said.
*
April choked on a piece of pulled pork at a friend’s birthday party.
“She came over to me like she was eating something hot,” said Wheeler.
She went to the garbage can to spit it out, “and then started freaking out,” Wheeler said. “Then it was just too late.”
The food was down in her lungs and nobody could do anything, he said.
When April died, Dyer struggled.
“I think he kept it to himself a lot,” Wheeler said. “He was the one being strong for my son and I.”
Dyer and his family wanted to donate the tree he planted to the state in April’s name. But officials went with a state forest tree.
Last summer, Dyer was diagnosed with bladder cancer and died Aug. 5.
*
Leslie Dyer who planted the tree in 1979, sits with his dog in an old photo.
Willis was with Dyer for 16 years until they divorced in 1986. She married Joe Willis in 1988.
“We were better apart,” Willis said.
But she and Dyer stayed friends. And Joe became best friends with Dyer. They hunted together and shared responsibility of raising April and her older sisters, Karrie Longley of North Pomfret and Anne Halloway of Kentucky, together.
They all took turns helping Dyer when he was diagnosed with cancer, filling in for a job that April would typically do. Wheeler was there day and night, helping him in and out of a wheelchair. They made meals for Dyer.
Joe sat with Dyer and wiped tears from his eyes.
“He did not want to go,” said Willis.
At April’s funeral, Dyer thanked Joe for what he did, raising April, Joe said.
“She lived on in his heart,” said Dyer’s sister, Denise Dwyer.
*
Joe, who works as the cemetery commissioner in Sharon, buried both Dyer and April, side by side in the family cemetery plot in Sharon.
It’s been a few years but to them it’s still surreal that April is gone.
April and Dyer’s tree will greet visitors at the entrance underneath the golden dome.
“He would be ecstatic, whether it was donated in his memory or April’s memory or both of their memories; would be ecstatic,” Dwyer said.
As for April?
The tree is lighted in Montpelier. (Rick Russell Photo)
“She probably would holler because it was so beautiful,” Willis said.
The tree was never trimmed or watered. It just grew in the perfect shape of a Christmas tree on its own.
Still, Willis feels its absence. There’s a ray of light that shines in her bathroom window that wasn’t there before.
Her neighbors and friends have made wreaths from its branches. And there may be some new trees in its place.
“We found today, underneath the tree, there are seedlings — a whole bunch,” Willis said.
