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    My Favorite Tree: How I Grew Up Talking to a Maple That Never Talked Back

    In a yard full of greenery, only one tree was sturdy enough to prop up my adolescence, even if it couldn’t survive my departure

    Growing up, our house had a yard that was, despite our complete lack of effort or expertise, lovely. We raked and mowed the lawn to avoid the censure of our neighbors, but everything else was left to figure out its own way through the thin New England soil as best it could.

    And yet we were lucky: The front yard boasted a plum tree that bore small, inedible plums but was blessed with beautiful, glossy purple-black leaves, a magnolia tree that graced us with fragrant, meaty flowers every spring, and a stately maple. Bushes, indifferently trimmed, hugged the house itself; the space between the shrubbery and the foundation was our favorite fort, complete with a bucket seat from an old car. We had forsythia and lilac bushes, and in the back yard, a mulberry tree (I grew up in a town once renowned for its silk mills), a couple pines, and two maples between which my mother hung sheets on a clothesline. One of these trees was my sister’s tree, and the other one—the friendlier one—was mine.

    Our street was short on kids my age, so I spent a lot of time more or less screwing around in the yard by myself, reading up on the roof or playing on the rusted-out swingset. The swing was right next to my tree, and I am not ashamed to tell you I would sit on the swing and chat merrily to the tree about my day. I was familiar with Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree—any kid whose best friend is a tree is also likely to be a kid gently described as bookish—and thought the tree really got the crap end of that relationship, so it’s possible I was trying to forge a more equitable model of human-tree friendship, or maybe I was just lonely and bored. But whatever the reason, I loved my backyard, and that tree in particular.

    We lived in that house until I was sixteen. By then my sister had left home, and my parents were keen to downsize (or maybe they just wanted to make sure my sister, a teen mom before it was cool, wouldn’t move back in). They sold the house, and we moved into an apartment behind my high school (reader, I still managed to be late to school every single day). I was at my after-school library job when an old neighbor stopped in and mentioned that the new owners had cut down all the trees in our yard. “What do you mean, all the trees? Front AND back?

    “Why??” I asked. Apparently the couple’s child had been stung by a wasp, and they decided on a full scorched-earth policy, reducing everything big enough to harbor a nest to a stump. The lyrical plum tree, gone. The forsythia and mountain laurel and lilac, gone (no forts for THAT kid).

    I still cruise my old house on Google Maps sometimes, looking for something—some clue, I suppose, to my soul.

    And my buddy the maple tree—gone. It felt like someone had plowed salt into the earth of my childhood, and I burst into tears, right there at work.

    I left my hometown after high school and have never returned for anything longer than a brief visit. I still cruise my old house on Google Maps sometimes, looking for something—some clue, I suppose, to my soul, or whatever it is that makes people nostalgic for places where they were never particularly happy—and thanks to that and the occasional slow drive-by when I’m in town, I know that whoever lives there now has put up new trees. A younger, anemic-looking plum tree grows where our beauty once stood; the magnolia has been replaced by some indeterminate little puff of a bush that looks like it wandered in from some other lawn. Their side bushes don’t even begin to cover the ugly foundation, and none of them are flowering.

    But what I really want to see is the backyard. I want to know if they’ve tossed a few indiscriminate plants back there, if they’ve found another mulberry tree to remind them of the town’s industrial past, if they have anything nearly robust enough to hold a clothesline or a young girl’s affection. It’s been almost 30 years since the Great Un-planting , plenty of time for a sapling to have matured into the kind of tree a child could strike up a friendship with. I like to imagine that the backyard has reclaimed itself, slowly unfurling secret delights for the children who are making their memories in my old house. Maybe the stump of my friend has become a natural planter. I hope one of these days I’ll cruise by on Google Street view and see once again the tops of trees waving above the roofline, proof of beautiful, hardy, irrepressible life.

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