September 1, 2013
Sunday

Two trees at the edge of our property

The trees were planted around 1994. They stand between our property and that of a church building that has changed ownership and denomination five times since the first group broke ground on what had been a fallow field.

I don’t know how long the field had stood like that when the neighborhood I live in was developed in 1976. But for the next 18 years we enjoyed a vista that rolled out from our back deck about forty feet to the property line, where the grass got a little wilder as it crossed a wide meadow to a wooded area about an acre to the south. Twenty of those forty feet that were ours we’d bought from the people who owned the field. They’d sold a strip to each of us new homeowners along the line when they needed to raise some fast cash. We were hoping to help them out piecemeal across the whole expanse, but alas, they never came back to us, and when they were ready to sell, they sold it all.

So a church was built, out of sight as I would sit at my kitchen table, still able to see across the broad meadow. The congregation planted the trees as sort of an informal boundary marker. They also built a gazebo directly across the field from my window. The trees were nursery size when they were installed,  maybe three-and-a-half feet tall and a good ten feet apart. Though I have sat most mornings for almost twenty years and gazed at the scene as part of my Coffee and Contemplation, I cannot tell you when the branches grew together and obscured the view of the gazebo.

I present the picture today as the first in a series inspired by Australian blogger Fat Mum Slim (Chantelle Ellem), who started the project in January of 2012. I am just back from my summer Gallivant, this year called the Days of Heaven — Carry On tour. I am filled with creative energy, back to work on revision and invention. I have two novels to finish and a third, begun in 1983 and abandoned in 2003, to resurrect from its shallow grave in a box that has never really been out of sight. I’ve blogged haphazardly from my travels. If I do nothing else here, at least there will be a picture, and maybe a paragraph or two of text.

It’s good to be back.