The Missing Tree

 It was the missing tree that triggered the thoughts of a time when this house on the corner anchored our neighborhood with gracious parents and their three boys.  It was the first tree my son had climbed when he was six years old and made possible with the help of the oldest boy providing a leg up.  Strange to think it may have been the only tree he has climbed in his 13 years so far considering I’d climbed hundreds by the time I was his age, living as I did in a more rural setting. 

On summer days I would drive by on my way home from work and see several boys in that front yard playing a game of some kind with a football.  My son tells me that on some plays he would go into “Hulk Mode” and act crazy mad so that “no one could stop me.”  We laugh at this now.  He was the smallest and youngest of the bunch.  He confesses that the older ones would miss tackles or he would crash into them and they would fall down as if hit by a great force, “Oh no!  Watch out, Elias is in Hulk Mode!”

Summer nights the parents of the kids would gather at the corner and talk about any number of topics: sports, child rearing, school problems and accomplishments, and how quickly our children were growing up.  Sometimes a rainbow of popsicle colors would arc forth from the front door and be dispersed to the kids to cool them off.  All of that withered away as the boys grew older and became too busy or too mature to participate in childish games.

And then a new family moved into that house on the corner and we knew an era had come and gone.  If it wasn’t sad enough that the original family had moved away, the new family cut down that perfectly healthy and beautiful tree leaving a thoroughly empty yard in its absence.


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