if I held my straight edge I’d be fine

When I was about 10 years old, one of my favorite things to do was to help my dad in his garden. I would dig up weeds, plant bean seeds, transplant seedlings that had grown in the dark of our basement with the help of fluorescent lights that I would run down stairs, turn off and then feel my way back through the cool darkness of our basement, and I would help collect the crops that we'd gotten at the end of each growing season. I loved listening to my dad tell me about the various plants and the way that he gardened. My favorite part of all of it was simply that I got to spend time with him. We'd chat with our neighbor who was a wise old retired plumber that loved his yard and garden more than anything. He'd give my dad advice and my dad would give him advice. It's such a simple thing, growing plants - simple, therapeutic and when you're done, you have something to show for it. A flower bed, vegetables, apples, a tree - a pretty landscape.

Where is this coming from - you might ask? In class tonight we talked a lot about ownership of nature and landscape and how we make patterns, we create things that nature might not have, and, is that a bad thing?

That year that I turned 10, I found a maple sapling in the black dirt in the back corner of our lot. I was ridiculously excited about it and made my dad let me plant it and take care of it. It was 'my' tree. Eventually, despite the fact that I truly think my dad thought it would die (probably the only reason he let me do it), we planted that tree in our front yard. It's weathered a few strong storms, it's trunk is split and it perpetually leans towards the street instead of standing tall and straight like the ash trees that line the street, but it's taller and bigger than ever before.

It now provides shade where I'm sure my dad would prefer there not be shade and at the same time, he always comments on the way it shades the front of the house, making leafy patterns of the fading afternoon sunlight. It filters that light that comes into the living room, dancing from the piano, to the couch, to the spot where he inevitably falls asleep doing the crossword puzzle. Now the tree is referred to as 'julia's tree' and sometimes, that's not necessarily a good thing. But, regardless of whether I took any ownership of it after finding it (amongst what I'm sure were millions of small trees), it is my tree. It stands there, a reminder of those hot summer afternoons when I would help my dad in the garden and then in the fall, though it's not straight and majestic, not perfectly uniform in color like the sugar maple in the backyard, it's stunning. And though I can't take credit for it growing, I do feel ownership in the sense that it belongs to me. And, I suppose, I to it.