hack noun 1. a writer producing dull, unoriginal work.  2. a dry, unproductive cough

It was the end of a long, cold February day in Iowa City, and I had the pleasure of being in the company of an attractive woman.  The fact that she was a talker made her more so.  There was nothing more I wanted than for her to keep right on talking.  It was hardly the first time I had felt that way.  Winter is the loneliest of times.

“Do you weld?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you a welder?” she asked.  “My Dad was a welder.  He had lung trouble.  They finally found out it was because of the fumes.  Do you weld?”

“No.  I’m not a welder.”

“Well, I really hope they find out what is going on with you.  Hopefully this scan will help them do that.”

I imagined we had been moving through that scan like cattle, and the fact that she could hold such a thought for me, a stranger at the end of the day, I found remarkable.  It was no surprise that she would wonder if I was like her Dad.  By now I was used to wondering whether she wanted me to be.

I had never seen anyone wear black scrubs before, and why the gal with the CT scan was wearing them was beyond me.  If she looked like an angel, then it was the Angel of Death.  Surely there were more cheerful colors, for surely there were those getting much worse news than I.

I had lived the previous two years thinking my persistent cough was the omen of something inheritable and, until a few months ago, largely untreatable.  (You might think me a hypochondriac, but I never have been before and am too old to go around picking up new habits now.)  An hour prior to the scan, I had found out it didn’t have anything to do with an inheritance at all.  It might just be heartburn or a calcified lymph node causing a tickle.  This should have been good news, but in some strange way I felt unaffected by it.

Now I even felt disappointed.  Her concern was unwarranted.  Still, she didn’t know that, so I didn’t tell her.

To get to the precautionary CT scan, I had made my way through a series of waiting rooms.  Most in them were older.  One was younger.  For some moving from waiting room to waiting room is like living; for some it is like dying.  While we tend to think the two are different, perhaps the only differences are immediacy and how you want to look at it.

“Your shirt has metal snaps; it will have to come off.”

It did and in the process revealed the extra 15-20 pounds it was probably doing a poor job of hiding anyway.

“I will have you lay right here on this table.  Don’t worry about your boots; they’re fine.  Now if you would just place both your hands above your head…perfect.  All right, the table is going to move through the scan and you will hear a voice telling you how to breathe, until then just breathe normally.”

For the first time in my life, looking at my pale, white belly and my lanky arms devoid of tone, I felt old.  It passed, though.  I then closed my eyes and prayed that they find the harpoon that got me.

When it was over, I snapped the shirt, donned the long black coat, and stood up in the boots which allowed me to reclaim as many of the trappings of youth my receding hairline would allow.  On the way home I stopped in West Des Moines and filled a prescription for an antacid and an inhaler.  I paid the man and handed half of my reclaimed trappings back.

“Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.”

-Red Smith

I’ve always associated with interesting people. One would think, if I do so often enough, some of the interesting is bound to rub off on me, but alas, it is not to be. The party ends, the lights go out, and I go home the same boring sonofabitch I’ve always been.

One of the interesting people I know is a friend I first made in elementary school, Heath Banks. Heath is an umpire. He has called high school games beyond count, worked college games, and an occasional one in Triple A. A year ago he even worked a game in St. Louis’ Busch Stadium.

Once he tried to make it to the big leagues. If you are going to do it, you need to do it by the time you are 25. Heath made his run at the age of 24.

He breezed through the first cuts and earned considerable distinction in the process.  He drug that distinction behind him going into the final round.  Now he would be calling big league spring training games, and his performance had earned him not a only place in the main park for his first game, but also behind home plate. “On the stick” as they say.

Heath was nervous beyond all get out, but he was also anxious to get the game started and for the butterflies to disappear. Taking his position behind home, he squatted down in his stance and felt a long rip followed by a breeze blowing up his backside. There, on the biggest stage of his career, before the first pitch had ever crossed the plate, in what he had hoped to be his finest hour, Heath had ripped the seat right out of his pants.  The distinction behind him would do little to hide it.

“It was horrible. All I could think about was that everyone in the stands could see my whitey tighties. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop the game. I had to get on with it.

When the pitches started coming in, I could hardly see straight. I had no idea where they were. My strike zone was all over the place. Around the third inning an instructor came down and asked, ‘What the fuck are you doing out there, Banks? You look like a god damn clown.’

After that I kind of knew it was over. I got sent down to the bottom of the deck at some little, out of the way field. After a game or two I realized no one was coming by to see how we were doing, and they were never going to come. I spent the rest of my time drinking beer with the guys.”

Fifteen years after his tryout, I got a call from Heath mid-October. “Got a few World Series tickets to game 6 in Kansas City. Any interest?”

“Hell yes.”

It would be a stretch to call me a fan of baseball. It’s not because I don’t enjoy it. I enjoy it above all other games. It would be a stretch to call me a fan because I know so little about it, especially when it comes to one of the things which separates it from all other games: its grand mountain of statistics.

Yet here I was, three or four rows up from the outfield and forty feet from the foul pole. Looking up at it, it appeared as though it was a hundred feet high.  I thought of how a ball might be hit down that line and over the wall.  Half the country would hang in suspense on whether it was fair or foul. Perhaps it would be part of a moment that would live forever in baseball lore. I would be among the first handful to know, a few seconds ahead of those watching at home, a few milliseconds before it would be added to the mountain of statistics already mentioned.

Pleasure doesn’t lie in keeping a secret. It is found in knowing first what everyone else will come to know later.

Lunch at the famous Arthur Bryant’s

Supper at Kauffman parking lot

All told, three of us had went down to see Heath, who was seeing all the home games that series. We spent the day in good company, eating the best food and having the occasional beer. I suppose it was the latter that had left me thinking I should share my observations on the sport I know so little about with the guy who actually gets paid to observe it. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Heath, I think the thing about baseball is the pauses. No other sport has them like baseball, and that’s too bad. During those pauses baseball places on you the full weight of the moment to come. The deep breath the pitcher takes just before delivery, the flight of the ball to home, all leave you waiting anxiously on the swing of the bat.”

Yes, I thought, whoever invented baseball knew a thing or two about anxiety and had simply built a game around it.

For Royals fans during that game, the potential of the second inning was realized beyond their wildest expectations. They would score 7 runs during it, and we whooped and hollered and drank more beer during the forty five minutes it lasted. Any anxiety drizzled out with the Giants hopes, and for the rest of the game the joy continued unabated.

At the VIP

“So I was offered some tickets to the VIP party afterwards. What do you all think?” asked Heath.

We were speechless.

Beyond the outfield wall, in the white tents pitched inside a wrought iron fence, everything was complimentary.  We judiciously used the free food and beer to bring our dollar cost average down for the food and beer we purchased during the game. When the dust had settled, we had ate and drank cheaper than any happy hour special Des Moines could boast of, and we had done so with the rich and famous, or at least their second cousins.

Banks and Moose

We headed back to the hotel, where we happened onto one of KC’s brightest stars, Mike Moustakas. The evening had been full of so many “I can’t believe that just happened moments,” I didn’t doubt that had happened at all. We recharged, and headed for a bar just down the street from where we were staying, called ‘The Quaff.’

“The Quaff is an ‘umpire friendly’ bar. All the towns have them. It’s a place the umps can go after a game where the owners ensure they can enjoy a little peace and quiet,” Heath told us.

As we walked in the door, the bar was a series of three, long, narrow corridors. We were in the first one. Along one wall stretched the bar, down the center was a narrow aisle, and stretching along the backside was a series of booths that would hold two a piece comfortably and four if it had to. We took a booth.

Occupying the rest of them and lining the bar were Royals fans. Light blue hats and light blue jerseys were all oriented to the old, grimy, color televisions, which had probably also broadcast the last World Series the Royals were in.  They were still showing post game coverage on the MLB Network. These fans had watched the entire game from these seats, and we looked at each other, quietly sharing the secret that we had enjoyed the game from better ones.

We all had a dab of light blue ourselves. Most of ours had been purchased only a few hours prior.

Quietly we began to talk the way people always talk after the unbelievable happens. At least three of us, giddy as schoolgirls, did. Heath was already on his third game of the series, and by now was old hat at it. He just sat and smiled the way people always smile when they give the gift that lights up the face of someone else.

All of the sudden he looked up and said, “They’re here.”

Coming through the door into the sea of blue was the World Series umpire crew. There was Des Moines native Eric Cooper, his wife Tara, and their son. Cooper’s shaved head was in a Notre Dame hoodie, and behind it was the flat top of Jeff Nelson. Behind all of them was Ted Barrett, the only major league umpire to have been behind the plate for two perfect games. The Coopers should have been pretty familiar with Barrett. They not only umpire together, but Barrett, an ordained minister, had married them. Jim Reynolds, also umpiring the 2014 World Series, was married by Barrett as well.

As they walked around the sea of blue before them, not a single hat turned, and not a single “Hey, aren’t you….” was heard. Everyone remained oriented to the old color TVs, while we got up to join them and make our way to the back of the bar. We passed through the second corridor, housing pool tables, a dart board, and a jukebox full of Tom Petty albums, and landed, safe at third, in the back one housing the kitchen, the restrooms, and a couple of dim lit lights.

There in seclusion, we spent an hour or two, putting a cap on a hell of a good night. Just before we left, I realized I was all wrong about baseball. It had nothing to do with finding anxiety in its pauses and its base paths. We find that daily in our own lives. Instead it has everything to do with finding peace, even if it had left your ass hanging out in the breeze one day.

The Crew: Myself, Justin Banks, Heath Banks, Frank Hawk

I thought I had just concluded my first television interview, and while the reporter for a local television station was preoccupied with putting his equipment away, the man behind the camera flipped off the bright light he had been pointing in my face, casually walked around it, and held his hands out for my mic. Having just managed to get it out from under my vest, I set the mic in one hand and the box attached to it in the other.

“Just between you and me, off the record, the whole problem here is Bill Stowe, isn’t it? I mean none of this was an issue before he came on the scene.”

He was referring to the manager of the Des Moines Water Works, whose board was about to file an intent to sue three northwest Iowa counties and their drainage districts over excessive nitrates in the Raccoon River, which is a partial source of the water the utility requires.

He still held his hands out, with the mic in them, right in front of me. The camera was still sitting on its tripod. If I were going to make a friendly wager, for some reason I would bet both of them happened to still be on. It didn’t really matter. The facts were what they were.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Soil and water quality have always been a concern and a focus of many producers’ efforts. If anything has changed with Stowe’s arrival on the scene, it is Des Moines Water Works’ approach to the problem. I believe you would find LD Mc Mullen (Stowe’s predecessor) was a proponent of the collaborative approach, and built many relationships in that regard with the community upstream. Stowe has ended many of those and seems to be intent on going it alone. At the end of the day the challenge for improved water quality is such a complicated issue, I don’t see how it is going to take anything less than all of us working together to find a solution.”

The cameraman had to be disappointed. I could have made several off the cuff remarks which could have been sensational side bars that would help sell the story and gain viewers. In the end, I said the main focus of concern was actually a collaborative effort to improve  soil and water quality. That’s hardly a sexy thing to sell to viewers, and no one understands that better than Bill Stowe.

In the public meeting which followed the interview, Stowe left the sensational to the public comments of those in attendance. He made an effort to be above the fray, representing a utility facing an ever increasing risk of nitrates affecting its ability to deliver safe, drinkable water to its customers, and whose back was against the wall after having exhausted every opportunity to meet with the agricultural community.

His entire statement was broken into effective 30 or 40 second sound bites, ready to be assimilated by the media in attendance, and demonstrating what makes Stowe so particularly capable. The most glaring problems, however, were that none of it appears to be true, and no one seems particularly motivated to check. Numerous farm groups have tried to meet with Stowe, but to no avail. As just one example, a representative from the Iowa Soybean Association spoke on the relationship the two groups once enjoyed in working in a collaborative partnership.  A relationship which doesn’t exist today.

While Stowe maintains that collaborative effort got his utility nowhere, the Iowa Soybean Association points to their own samples, tested by the Water Works themselves, which show a 25% reduction in nitrate concentrations from 1999-2014 in the Raccoon River. These reductions were due to “refinement in cropping systems.” Their data is backed by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and the U.S. Geologic Service.

The next day I had a chance to be interviewed by an NPR reporter. I thought it went rough. At its conclusion I was asked, “This is really an urban vs. rural debate isn’t it?” I stumbled through the following:

“I fear that’s the way it will be portrayed by news outlets, I guess, but no, that is not how I see it. I see us in agriculture working with our local Soil and Water Conservation Boards, our local counties, our state’s Department of Natural Resources and Department of Agriculture, the National Resource Conservation Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Personally, I’m proud of these efforts and of this legacy. I’m not the only one.

If we want to start at the tip of the iceberg, the Region 7 administrator of the EPA is on the record as saying that the voluntary, collaborative approach is the role model everyone else should be working off of, and the best way to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Agriculture is doing that.  It is doing it right outside my front door, in the little watershed I live in, Badger Creek.

The approach that the Des Moines Water Works is taking is not making it ‘urban vs. rural.’ It is making it the Des Moines Water Works vs. everyone else involved. It is also introducing a new legacy, one of litigation.”

If I didn’t say it exactly like that, I should have.

Sometimes we are tempted to think our grandparents knew all the secrets we haven’t figured out yet.  So we bestow on them reverence, as though they had an understanding which surpassed our own.  We neglect to account for the fact that when our grandparents knew it, it wasn’t a secret yet.

This past summer I did something I hadn’t done in a long time.  Truth be told, I may have never done it at all.  I wrote letters, actual letters, letters which bore my own chicken scratches, that were sealed in an envelope, which was plastered with a stamp and then sent to roam half the world and half its people till it found the one I meant it for, in whom I hoped it may find approval.

The technology is centuries old and as amazing now as it was then, if you want to take the time to think about it.

The real marvel, however, the most pertinent thing which escapes us and our technology of today, is what takes place once the letter finds the addressee.  Opening it, they find a little part of whoever it was that sent it.  For the sender this part had aged for several days and had gotten old, but half way around the world this old self becomes new again in the eyes of another.  For a moment, two different versions of ourselves exist in two different places at the exact same time.

Somehow in all the world, a letter found them, and my old self was made new again and got a second chance to do some good.  I hope it did.

This has been replaced by the celebrated technology of today, which gives us instead the remarkable ability to be the same old ass in two different places at the exact same time.

Growing up near a rural town in Iowa, one discovers the only other things more than a couple of stories tall besides the water tower are church steeples and grain elevator legs. When I was married in one of the former, I was working in one of the latter. The elevator is called BB&P, and sits on the north side of Winterset. In planning the slide show for the wedding, my wife to be came across a picture of me at the age of three, donning a seed cap and a bright red jacket, both with a checkerboard logo and the embroidered name of the elevator I would come to work for. “That’s so going in,” she said.

It was at this time that I began to wonder if I had been indoctrinated at an early age into a church of sorts with a grain leg for a bell tower. While some may think that sacrilege, my intent is not to offend.  I can only say upon reflection several similarities have emerged.

My earliest memory of the place was my sisters and I filing in the door to be greeted by one of the owners, Dean Molln. “You guys look thirsty,” he astutely observed and began to fish into his pocket to find the quarter the pop machine required. I might have been five or six at the time, and over the coming years this scene would be played out repeatedly. One would hear the click of the button, then the subsequent hum of the machine, and finally the loud “clunk” as the bottle came home.  Dean would pop the top off, give it to my youngest sister, and we would all pass it around.

The taste was wonderful; the bottle ice cold and dripping in what I now recognize as nostalgia itself. That, I suppose, was my baptism. Not by Holy Water, but instead by an ice cold Coca-Cola from a blue and white Pepsi baptismal font. All of it was much to the pleasure of our smiling parish priest of sorts, a priest could have taught the rest of them a thing or two about telling good jokes and cussing properly.

Inside the door today, as has been for decades, a long countertop nearly spans the length of the room. Across that countertop homilies are frequently offered on our current state of affairs, from political candidates and pending legislation to anything of note form the newspaper, TV, or radio. (Quieter ones are sometimes offered by patrons on more local affairs.) A solution to many of the world’s problems has likely been stumbled upon several times, but seeing how no one is in a position to implement it, it is left to be stumbled upon again.  The dead are eulogized, often more candidly than during the service. The crop is declared damned, then saved, and then damned and saved again, and rain is asked to come or go.

My first communion took place across this counter, just after I had pulled my shaky leg off the clutch pedal, having brought my first load of grain successfully into town. In doing so I crossed the scale, which leveled me with all others.  A couple of years later, at my confirmation, I was able to sell grain and make purchases on my own accord.

Incense was often part of the daily service here, before state law forbid it. On special occasions, like at the end of a long day, the completion of a hard job, or just before the undertaking of something no one wanted to do, it wasn’t uncommon to come in the back door and find Bob Rhodes with his pipe, and Jim Cook, Nick Beck, and Larry Molln (another owner) with their cigarettes. There was so much smoke in the air, it was impossible not to feel a sense of reverence as they were lost deep in the midst of their meditations.

Now off to the right of the main office, across the red and white checkerboard floor, is the mill room. In there one can find Mike Corkrean or Gary Dudney spinning the wheels, pushing the pedals, pulling the cables and turning the chains necessary to bring the hammer mill and mixer whirring to life. Many a boy has stood in there, as much in awe of the factory of motion and sound as though it were a grand pipe organ. I would suppose there are organists to which the whirr of the hammer mill is preferable, but none were ever coated in the residue their notes left behind.

In the back right corner is Paul Bruett’s office, the elevator’s agronomist. He handles seed sales, and does his best to exorcize any blight, deficiency, or petulance that afflicts the crop.

In the back left corner, down the hall, first door on you right is the accountant’s office. In it Pam McCullough sends out the monthly tithing request and takes in whatever offerings the congregation has for the moment.

The first door on your left is Bob and Peggy Casper’s office, also owners. While it is very much the working office, with mail coming in or going out, records kept on file, and situations being handled as they arise, it also has a secondary purpose. It’s where you come to confess your best laid plans did in fact go a rye. Your penance is nearly always another year of trying it again.

Finally, on the left of the counter is a small shop of sorts. There everything broken is mended. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lazarus himself steps out of it someday.

Marriages? Oh there are marriages. Some employees have never known another job, others had, but after finding this one have stuck with it for decades, Yes, over the years there have been a few divorces. Some were amicable, some not. Some quiet, and others filled with all sorts of fireworks.

All that is missing, I suppose, is the altar boys. I’m afraid even I can’t compare the guys at the shop to altar boys. I would admit, though, they could give them one hell of an education.

The door is nearly always open. The families of the men that work here sometime have Thanksgiving in the evening because the day was spent hauling anhydrous to the customers, or unloading grain. Employees work those days because the owners work those days, and you forget about what you’re sacrificing when you see the sacrifice of another. It’s not done to make every last dollar, but in order that customers may not know need. That has allowed the business to know a lot of customers.

One day I was getting lunch in town. The woman ahead of me, with her young son, turned and asked, “You work at BB&P, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

She continued, “This one’s first word was tractor,” pointing towards her son, “and his second word was BB&P. None of my family knew what the hell he was talking about, but my husband’s sure did.”

I smiled and thought of how another one had been brought into the fold.

So is it a religion then? Of course not. But it is something, I suppose.

Who was it that said the snow should fall upon the ground,
as it lay barren and lifeless in the winter time?

The ground does not mind the freeze.
It hurts it not, but breaks and heaves it,
so it might be softer in the spring.

Instead, over the tears of a cup of coffee,
Or the unvoiced fears of a friend,
In finding the lonely with all of their company,
And those finished before they start again,

Frozen, I think, we just get harder
and less receptive to the spring,
more unwilling to let establish
whatever might that season bring.

Let the ground lie cold and naked.
Our being hard is not a virtue;
let the snow blanket us instead.

Who was it that said the snow should fall upon the ground,
as it lay barren and lifeless in the winter time?

Sometime ago I started with the goal of trying to write once a week.  On occasion I do not, but generally I have been able to adhere to it.  This week I nearly missed.

The goal had a simple premise behind it:  we should spend our lives doing what we enjoy, that if we are not careful we won’t, and we will find it all slipped away.  Surely I could come up with something human to write about once a week, I thought.  Surely being human is a common experience.

It isn’t, though, and that’s the funny thing.  We tend to hide what most makes us human.  None of us hides it perfectly, and an observer sometimes finds a glance, or movement, or word from us which lets them slip in without our knowing.  These are the moments we try to capture in our photographs, and our writing, and our art.

In these instances the creator generally works to cover it back up again, leaving it to find for those with the eyes to see or ears to hear.  They avoid giving it away for nothing, and maintain respect for whatever it was someone was trying to hide in the first place.

When I wrote about fall in Northeast Iowa, for example, it was about my fear of my father’s declining health.  I tried to get death to subtly work its way in and out of the piece in the topics of divorce, and autumn, and the effigy mounds, not being able to get up the hill, etc.  I took the topics I couldn’t touch on with those closest to me and found a way to share them with anybody and their brother.

I never could quite get it right, but it still lays out there, to take up and edit again, and that’s the wonderful thing about writing.  Most of the words I have said failed when they left my mouth, and the ones I should have used always come to me after the moment has passed.  In the ones I write lie the hope that someday I’ll get ones in the right place at the right time.

A couple of days later, Dad was back up on his feet again, and I was off on other topics.  If I don’t watch it, the piece will get away from me, and Dad will too.

Now on occasion we run into people not playing the same game the rest of us are.  They feel no need to make it look like everything is under control.  Or if they feel that need for everyone else, for some strange reason they don’t feel they have to with you.  I ran into one this week.  The subtle hints were gone, and I was hit over the head with what it was like to be human.

In doing so it stripped away my own subtly, my dry wit and confidence and left in their wake the anxious little boy of my youth, naked and knobby kneed.  I was embarrassed and I was certain I’d be abandoned for it.  I wasn’t.  The boy I couldn’t accept, they accepted just fine.  I hope I had done the same for them.

It should be so rare in life, and if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have felt so remarkable.

Typically I write the words I’ve paid a price for.  But the only price for these was a little embarrassment, and what I got in return was far more valuable.  I had got the better end of the deal, and for that I owe.

It seems the only way to pay the debt is to do it for someone else, and that advice I offer freely to anybody and their brother.

“Life is messy,” they said.  Yes, and sometimes our maintaining it isn’t only makes it worse.  We miss out on all the good things that come from getting caught not having our shit together.

Tree at my window, window tree,

My sash is lowered when night comes on;

But let there never be curtain drawn

Between you and me.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,

And thing next most diffuse to cloud,

Not all your light tongues talking aloud

Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,

And if you have seen me when I slept,

You have seen me when I was taken and swept

And all but lost.

The day should put our heads together,

Fate had her imagination about her,

Your head so much concerned with outer,

Mine with inner, weather.

Tree at my Window  -Robert Frost

At one time, while this place was still being settled, people would plant trees in their yard. They say it was for the shade mostly, but seldom have I ever seen anyone sitting in the shade of the tree in their yard. I suspect it was to make a new home homier, for a tree is nearly as fine a thing to come home to as a house is.

Some people still plant trees, but the country is settled now. The existing ones go along with the houses they are attached too. Whatever dreams were to have taken root with them, whatever hopes and longings, they are now simply included in the purchase price. “Thrown in” as they say, given the fact that they never impact the price in the least. It seems the highest hopes and the highest dreams trade at the same rate as the lowest of them.

All our hopes and dreams appear to be of equal value. If not to us, then to the next ones.

One evening last week I got home in time to take my daily hike to the mail box and see if I got anything of note beyond the political mailings, limited time offers, and bills the day typically offers. I had not. I seldom do. I thought of taking the mailbox down altogether but then thought I might get something of note someday. So I left it up. As I walked back, I glanced at the oak in the corner of my yard.

There, in the light of the early evening, I found half the tree a magnificent gold and speckled in green. The other half was a dark, somber green speckled in yellow. It seems the tree was at odds with itself on whether to embrace the current season upon us, or hold on to the summer that had passed. I too get at odds with myself on such matters, and think I might make a fine tree someday. That is if one should someday take me up and relieve me of being part of the plain, ordinary grass.

I wouldn’t help its value none, but I wouldn’t hinder it either, I suppose.

Taken the next morning, and already decidedly more yellow.

Across the way, at my parent’s home, stand a row of pine which witnessed the rise and fall of the family that planted them, and still hang around, ever green, for whatever it is that will happen next. Not being native, they shed a few needles in the fall and make an attempt to fit in. This is the tree equivalent to crocodile tears, however, and as winter arrives and their neighbors disrobe, revealing the spindly and knotted nature their leaves had been concealing, the pine attempts to keep its dignity.

Planted by the Breen family around 1885. They were to have had an abundance of potatoes in their cellar, and so they threw a few in the bottom of each hole.

It keeps so much of it, though, at times it looks down right gaudy. In trying to maintain dignity’s appearance, it forsakes most of it. This not unlike the new neighbor, coming over and partaking in your Busch Light, only for you to visit him one day and find his fridge stocked with various micro brews.

In my yard, though, sat a red oak. This is the tree which keeps its dignity. Its leaves would turn, even if half of them didn’t know it yet, and what will happen when they do gives the oak the dignity denied the pine. Instead of discarding the old, dried out remembrances of what was, the red oak keeps clothed in them until it catches a glimpse of spring. It neither throws what happened to the wind, nor maintain a false green countenance to suggest nothing did.

This particular tree was planted in 1975, when my grandfather and grandmother built a new home, leaving the old to Mom and Dad so they would have a house big enough to raise a family in. During the drought of 1977, it seemed the tree had died, but in three shoots showed up at its base in the spring of 1978. The new shoots became small talk between my Dad and Grandfather as the latter battled cancer.

“You should pick the strongest one,” he told my father, and so my father did.

I suspect the other two’s leaves would have been as much at odds as this one’s was, and I suspect they would linger just as long as this one’s will. What then was it that made this one the strongest? I don’t know, and no one will ever price it.