All Except the One

road to home

single tree

It's so good to have a sense of home where a dirt road winds through grassy hills in a creek-carved canyon and every curve and rise of the land is familiar. There is so much solace in walking here, even if it's just to the mailbox in the hopes of a letter, or a wander to a neighbor's house, or an oft-traversed loop of steep uphill trudges and stretches of delight.

Above is my homecoming road. See that odd little tree on the hillside? It's a mature eucalyptus, grown to its capacity given the limitations of that site. My in-laws planted it decades ago along with several others all in a row. They had plans back then to expand the macadamia orchard, and a line of tall, fast-growing eucalyptus trees would have served as a nice protective windbreak, and anyone who knows about the crazy winds around here can understand how useful that might be.

But plans change, no new nut trees were planted, and before long the eucalyptus trees stood straight as soldiers with nothing to guard. Mostly what they did was block views...in fact, they became the view...an odd interruption in the natural flow of the landscape.  We decided they needed to go.

It's curious how heartless it feels to remove a tree, even one you arbitrarily planted. (I'm dealing with this issue now as I contemplate removal of a sad and scraggly lilac bush I have been trying to coax along for fifteen years or so.) But just a few years after we put them in, the row of eucalyptus trees was taken down, all except the one.

And how I love the one.