Paved Memories

  
There was a Witches' Tree -- old and dieing with long, dry spindly branches surrounded by sumac and tall grasses -- to which I escaped. I ran up the trunk and grabbed the nearest branch hoping it wouldn't snap beneath my weight. I climbed the tree with a satchel over my shoulder and ground a comfortable spot to sit. Then I wrote. Mostly it was nonsense or fantasies about being Jacob Wetterling.

The Witches' Tree was felled for a parking lot expansion, and the small woods that surrounded it was also torn down. The smell of composting earth is gone; the rough bark that scraped my knuckles is gone; the sticky resin of sumac is gone.

I visit this space frequently because it reminds me that nature is as temporary as childhood memories, and childhood memories are as easily paved over.

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