The tree — visible in photos circulating on local social media — fell with enough force to leave a root disk the size of a small room, a pale dirt circle exposed to the sky now where the base had been. The trunk lay across the grass in sections by the time anyone was photographing it, bark still intact, the interior wood a clean, unrotted tan. Whatever took it was weather, not age.

The Panhandle is a particular kind of park: a long, skinny corridor that doesn't invite lingering the way Dolores or Alamo Square do, but accumulates daily use the way corridors do — dog walkers, cyclists treating it as an on-ramp to the Wiggle, kids from the nearby schools cutting across after the bell. The trees there do most of their work silently, as canopy.

That's what makes this kind of loss register differently than, say, a pothole or a broken bench. The thing that fell was also a timekeeper — someone's estimate put the tree at decades old — and the gap where it stood is already functioning as a small landmark in reverse, a place people point to by saying used to be.

The city's Department of Public Works typically handles removal after a windfall event, and the stump or root disk may take additional time to clear.

Anyone walking that stretch of the Panhandle tomorrow will notice the light falling differently on the path — more of it, for now, and coming from the wrong angle.