heres a tree story...in my hometown, Mesa Arizona there was an orchard of
orange trees in a lot close to a friends house. the orchard used to be
stuffed with mexican immigrants - picking away and loading up a big truck
with oranges... at the time, we were mischeivious little bastards - we would
sneak through the dense orchards and throw oranges at the unsuspecting
workers.....anyway, at the corner of that lot there was an enormous old
tree - huge old tree - it looked over the orchard and the
intersection........we used to hang out under the tree cause in addition to
the abundant shade, it provided something of hiding place for staging our
attacks on the workers there....punk kids causing the ruckus
Fast Forward...a number of years - My friend was now in the military and we
had all grown up a little bit - we'd become a little more considerate of
others i guess. That tree that we hid under had slowly found it self
surrounded by a number of housing developments. The orchards had since been
bulldozed and the ground leveled. The tree stood there looking over an empty
field, a much busier intersection and a bunch of wooden skeletons for brand
new cookie cutter houses... I remember thinking how lonely the tree looked.
So, this sounds a tiny bit sad in itself...i think anyway...but it gets a
bit worse. I would soon discover, and boy was i shocked, that the tree had
no place in the development plan. They cut it down. Can't imagine how old it
was - they just cut it down. In its place now is an entrance to a housing
development - a particularly bland one i might add. To top it all off,
instead of having a huge tree at the entrance they built a 'beautiful'
waterfall on each side of the entrance gate.....a beautiful desert oasis of
an entry.
