Tony's Tree

Whenever someone, usually someone who grew up elsewhere, said to me when I was growing up, "Nothing grows in Nevada!" I'd say only three words: "My mother's yard."

"Well, OK, in your mom's yard," they'd say. My mother could grow anything. She and my dad bought a piece of typically empty Nevada land; their friends told them that they'd "never be able to grow anything there." Mom told, with glee, the story of how their most vocal critic pulled into the back driveway in the spring, when the flowers were blooming, the lawn was velvet, and the trees were filled out. "He stared with his mouth open, then got back in his car and drove away. He never came back, but we never heard any grief from him again."

My mom literally brought home cut branches, stuck them in the ground, and they turned into trees. A now towering cedar came home from a picnic in a styrofoam cup. She had fruit trees, vegetables, more flowers than you can count.

Now, it's been more than three years since she passed away, her yard hasn't been watered even once, and it's an absolute jungle. The shrubs and vines and things have taken over. The flowers are reseeding. There are seedling trees that have to go, because they have no room to grow up where they are. They're burying fences and patios.

Since I was a kid, the largest tree in her front yard has belonged to my friend. I mentioned it in my blog post just after Mom passed away ("Mom"): "Can I build a Swiss Family Robinson tree house in your tree and just live in it?" one of my friends asked her once. "Sure. You just let me know when," she said. Every few years, he'd bring it up - "That tree still there?" and she'd say, "Still waiting for you." "Maybe I'll bring my son over, and we'll build that treehouse," he'd say. "I'll be here," she'd tell him. We've called it Tony's Tree for years. It will always be Tony's Tree. 

They talked about his planned treehouse many times. "I want it to have power, plumbing, everything. I want to be able to live in it," Tony would say. "Sure," Mom would answer. After storms, he'd want to know, "How's my tree?"

"You're never going to cut that tree down, are you?" he asked once. "Oh, no," she said, sounding scandalized.

After Mom died, Tony came over to her house for her memorial, and again for Thanksgiving. "Is that tree still mine?" he asked. "Of course! It's always going to be yours!" My whole family knew. It was his; any time he wanted to build a treehouse, he was welcome. His kids were too old to be excited about a treehouse, but he hoped to have grandchildren. Maybe some day, they'd get to use it. "Maybe some day, I'll be homeless, and need to live in it," he joked.

A year and a half after Mom died, Tony died. I was unprepared for it ("Loving Tony"). He was sober, he wasn't sick, he'd recovered from a devastating car accident - everything was supposed to be OK.

Nothing on Earth lasts forever.

The tree comforted me. It stood where it always had. It waited.

I was comforted by the fact that we all knew that it was still Tony's Tree. Some day, when we had the money, I would build the treehouse. Maybe Tony's grandkids would get to use it. When I looked at it, I saw my mother, I saw Tony, I saw possibilities, I saw stability and predictability.

But the tree is old, and the weather is harsh.

"A big branch broke off of Uncle Tony's tree," said my daughter. She lives in her grandmother's house (which is now her Uncle Gary's house).

"Yeah, a lot of branches broke during that storm," I answered. Heavy, wet snow, much needed snow, and high wind had wrought havoc around town. But that tree is older than I am. Its trunk is probably 12 feet or more around. It would be fine, I was sure.

Then I went down and looked at the tree. The broken branch is huge, looking like a decent sized tree by itself. Its base is as big around as a person, and left a deep gash in the trunk as it peeled off. It's the kind of gash that invites insects or disease. Worse, as I looked up into the canopy, I saw what I've been ignoring and denying - dead wood.

Many of Mom's willow trees are showing dead wood in their higher branches. It happens, it's normal. But I have been actively in denial about how much is in Tony's Tree. There's quite a bit.

"That whole tree has to go," said someone behind me. It may have been my husband, or my son; I don't know. I just stared at the tree. "Yeah," I said, but I didn't mean it. That tree will outlive me - won't it? It outlived my mom. It outlived Tony. It'll always be there, won't it?

"It has to go." Someone else said it. It probably does, but I'm not OK with that.

The tree is coming to the end of its life. I have to wrap my head around that.

We puttered around doing yard chores; my daughter isn't a yard person. I kept thinking about the tree. I walked up and put my hand on its trunk. "I know," I said, "I know."

"Who are you talking to?" my son wanted to know.

"The tree." Then the tears came.

As long as the tree was there, I didn't have to let go. There are other trees - willows, apple trees, plum trees, junipers, a cedar, maples, an oak, stumps from long dead poplars. I would be OK losing any of them, even all of them, but not this tree. I was never prepared to lose this tree.

My son hugged me, long and hard.

My daughter came out of the house, saw me, and said, "What's wrong with Mom?"

"Uncle Tony's tree."

I know that I won't love them any less if I don't have their things with me. I know that they love me, with or without their stuff. I know that I haven't failed the tree, or failed my loved ones. I understand all of that. It's simply an intellectual understanding, though, not an emotional response. I will miss this tree more than I can say.

My family has assured me that we will make something with the wood, something great. We will leave the trunk standing. Maybe we'll hire a chainsaw artist. Maybe we'll make it look like the home of fairy tale elves. We will make something, something wonderful, something to honor Tony and my mother. I know that we will.

But change is hard.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

"Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again..."
- "The Sound of Silence," Simon & Garfunkel

This feeling is familiar, and yet new. I've been struggling to categorize and catalog it for months, with no luck.

Mostly, it's exhaustion.

I have to finally come to terms with the fact that these last years are kicking my butt.

Part of the problem is that I'm very good in an actual crisis. Calm, clear headed, efficient, helpful, unflagging - you want me around when there's trouble. It's after the trouble itself has passed and the danger is gone, or the trauma is past, that I come undone.

Part of it is that there's nothing tragic going on. This is just normal stuff, a normal life. But, objectively, I have to admit that things are adding up.

Arbitrarily, let's pick the mark of three years ago. I've had three major surgeries in three years. They all went well. I recovered nicely. Still, I'm in residual pain, and fundamental things - for instance, how I walk - are forever altered. My endocrine system is shot, and my body chemistry has been forcibly altered. Those things are tiring, in and of themselves.

I have ongoing health issues, and I'm developing a deep, unwanted hostility and hatred for insurance companies. Not helpful.

My mother is gone. We'll soon come up on the second anniversary of her death. I have been unable to attend church on Mother's Day since she passed. So often, I want to call her, want to visit her, and I can't.

My childhood best friend passed away; he was 48. If you want to know how tightly someone is woven into your life, pull that thread loose. Sometimes it feels like everything will unravel. He touched everything in my life, from the time that I was 14.

My son left for college hundreds of miles away. It was easier than sending his sisters, because he's the third child, and we've Been There, Done That. It was also harder, because his older sisters attended public school and left the house at 6:30 am, often not returning until 10 pm or later. My son was homeschooled, so even when he worked 5 or 6 hours a day, he was home with us for hours a day. His absence is more noticeable.

Part of it is that I've been down the rabbit hole, and I'm together enough to recognize that I'm not there. I remember that a bit too vividly. Twice in my life I've had breakdowns so complete that they blackened the sky, choked the air with ash, just consumed everything in their path. This is not one of those times. (And for this, I thank God.)

There are times of great joy and deep contentment, and lots of normalcy, and I honestly think that I've handled everything well, but do you know how I can tell that I haven't? Or, maybe I have, but that hyper competent period is wearing off. Stuff I should be able to shrug off doesn't shrug. It gnaws at my extremities like some annoying, rabid animal.

"Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains."

The other day, I was thrown into mourning for the fact that my two closest girlfriends moved away after high school. I mean, I handled this clear back in 1984, and suddenly my middle aged self is in tears. What gives?

OK, maybe that's easy to diagnose. I keep seeing in my head two absolutely beautiful smiling brunet high school boys, and all the memories shared with them, and they're both dead now. As time goes on, there will be fewer of Us left, the ragtag community, the family we created for ourselves, the group of former kids who were my life in high school, who still populate my life now. We'll all leave each other sometime. I've become (probably annoyingly) effusive, reminding them how much I have always adored them. I fear becoming clingy and syrupy and maudlin.

Circumstances are preventing me from doing a lot of otherwise normal stuff, like auditioning. I was in a show, had just started rehearsals, when my mom passed away. I had the presence of mind to step down from a major role to a chorus role, but I had no business being in a show. My head was not in the game. I need solitude when I'm hurt - I'm like a canine who needs to find a den and lick my wounds. I stayed because I've never dropped out of a show, and I also hoped that doing normal things would help. During times of stress, I crave normalcy. I hoped that it would feel normal. I didn't even tell anyone that my mom had passed away until we were performing, and then I told all of four people in a cast and crew of dozens.

It never did feel normal. Months of rehearsal, and it never felt right. It felt empty. And good heavens, let's not even talk about the work I did. The work stunk. I also, for the first time in my lifetime, since I started acting at 12 years old, missed an entrance - missed an entire scene - during a performance. That's just unacceptable. That's more humiliating than being naked in public. It's horrifying to even admit. And yet, I think that maybe three people even noticed. I was only in two freakin' scenes - crowd scenes. I was so unnecessary and expendable, yet knocking myself out trying to do a decent job. Yet I was not thinking clearly enough to see that I should have bowed out entirely.

I hear that being intoxicated is like that - you honestly can't tell whether or not you're functional.

I recently looked back at the photos I shot of the show, and I was pleased to discover that they were good. That part of me continued to function quite well. That was nice to know.

I'm finally reaching the point that maybe I could handle a show. But, months of being wheelchair bound, and more time with my feet in casts, means that it's not an option. If I can't even drive, I sure as heck can't rehearse or perform.

Since I can't work on anything, I'm even less inclined to watch anything, because it's painful. So, I don't even see most of my friends' shows, which means that I'm missing out in all kinds of ways.

Maybe I'm not ready for a show yet. Ordinary human behavior is too difficult for me right now. People will be inconsiderate, annoying, self centered - you know, human - and it's just too much. I finally understand about "the straw that broke the camel's back." You just can't handle one more freaking thing. Any rudeness or nastiness or even just annoyingness pushes past the breaking point. And, you know and I know, life is FULL of rudeness and self centeredness.

I've always been very Greta Garbo, but I need to be alone even more now. It's exhausting to be with people. EXHAUSTING. Not depressing or unfulfilling, just so tiring.

It's not that I don't like you. Chances are, I do. I like people in general. I deeply love many people, personally. I just like them at a distance. Don't take it personally.

I'm perfectly OK with being flawed. (I mean, have you seen my housekeeping? Please.) But here's what I'm going to do, what will preserve my sanity and keep me from unleashing the dogs of war on random passers by, or people in my family who simply chose the wrong moment to be insensitive. Sometimes, I am not going to cope well. I'm just not.

I will burst into tears when the radio is on - some days, not at all, and some days, with virtually every song. And here's the thing - I'm going to stop being embarrassed or upset by it.

I don't want you to comfort me and tell me it'll be OK. I really, truly, don't. I don't want you to get manic in your efforts to cheer me up, trying to get me to laugh. It will just annoy me.

Most of the time, I am fine. Everything is great. Even things that hurt are small potatoes. I sit here in a climate controlled house that I own, eating every day, sleeping in a bed, showering - life is luxurious. I have family. I have friends. I love what I do, and I pretty much set my own hours.

And yet. Sometimes, life will shatter at a moment's notice. That's as normal and predictable as the sun rising. Sometimes, I will break.

Sometimes, I will also sleep too much or eat too much sugar. And you know what? I will not feel guilty.

And sometimes, I will regret having said all of this, because people still won't understand, and I'll feel exposed, and everyone will be awkward, and good grief, can I just live on a deserted island?

Sometimes, I just need quiet.

"And the sign said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered
In the sound of silence."

Loving Tony

I recently lost a man I have loved since we were both children. He was 48 when he passed away - much too young for us to be prepared to lose him. Still, as they say, "It's not the years; it's the mileage," and he'd lived more than most people.

He wrote a published book in his 20s. In his 40s, he started working on an autobiography. It would tell details of his life, like how, at 25, he owned the second largest company of its kind in the world, printing backstage passes for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Billy Joel. He was making, we often said, more money than God.

Nothing in his life was of ordinary size and scope. Years later, he lost the company, and eventually, his family. He developed a drug problem that should have killed him. He consumed alcohol like it was water.

And, he lived to get clean and sober, religiously attending his meetings for AA, NA, and CA.

He asked me to write the foreward to his book. This is it.

*******************

Tony Perry is my brother. Most people gain siblings through some action taken by their parents, and are linked by biology, marriage, adoption, or in some other legal and definable way. This is not true for us; our parents might not immediately recognize each other if they passed on the street. There is no legal document defining our relationship. He is my brother because of decisions he and I have made, and because something in his soul speaks to something in mine. If you have people like this in your life – and I am fortunate to have many – you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, there are no words that will adequately explain it to you.

I remember the first time I saw Tony. I was a 14 year old high school freshman. He was a 14 year old sophomore, wearing a jacket that said, "Italian Stallion" on the back. He wore that jacket everywhere. He was loud, abrasive, charismatic and funny. I was quiet and unsure. At the first audition of the year, he made a hash out of the cold reading, and obviously delighted in doing so. The teacher sighed and said, "Never ask a techie to read lines." My attention sharpened – I was one of the few kids from my junior high theater department to actually have tech experience. It soon became apparent that not only was Tony a techie, he was THE techie in our school.

I also remember the first time Tony met my mother. So does Tony – she impressed him immediately. The school boundaries for our school were odd and elongated, so that a large number of my schoolmates came from the neighboring city, and rode the bus for half an hour to get to and from school. Tony was one of those kids. One day he missed the bus, and asked if my mom could drive him home. My mom always had a car full of kids, no matter where we went. "It's pretty far, clear out in Hidden Valley," I told her, but she was willing to take him. Tony climbed into the back of the car with an armload of books, far too many to be just his homework. "Hi," he said, "I'm Tony. I steal textbooks." Mom didn't bat an eye.

"Hello, Tony," she said.

Down the street from our school, there was a convenience store. Tony seemed to live on apple juice sold in little round, apple shaped, single serving bottles. He leaned over the back of the seat and said, "I feel like an apple juice. Can we stop and get one?" Mom slowed down and pulled into the parking lot.

Tony was beside himself. "She's stopping! You're stopping! You're actually gonna stop?"

"Sure," she said. "You have money, right?"

Tony talked about that for years. "I couldn't believe she actually stopped so I could get an apple juice!"

We had little in common, really, but it didn't matter.

Tony was the sun around which the theater revolved. He designed our drama guild T-shirts and our black satin jackets. He was our official technical director and our unofficial social director. Tony created our own holidays, The Thirteen Radical Days of Christmas, and as a group we designed a different activity every day for the thirteen days leading up to Christmas break. One day, we went to a Monty Python film festival; one day we bought our lunch from the generics aisle of Albertson's. (Remember generics? Remember when they took up an entire aisle?) He planned our group vacations to Disneyland.

On our first Disneyland trip, we had 9 or 10 of us, of both sexes, crammed into a single hotel room. My mother slept in the armchair; Tony slept in the bed next to me.

He'd started out across the room, on the floor, but two of the girls kept flicking Skittles candy at him after lights out. "Hey!" he yelled loudly, into the dark, "she hit my wiener with a Skittle!"

"Tony. Don't use that word," my mother chastised.

"Fine. She hit me in the penis with a Skittle." A few minutes later, he declared loudly, "She did it again!"

"Find somewhere else to sleep, then," Mom told him.

"There is nowhere else!"

"You can find someplace."

He walked around the room, stopping at the side of the double bed I was in. "I," he declared dramatically, pointing down at the bed, "am sleeping here." Then he looked down at me. "That OK with you?"

"Fine with me."

He checked with my mom. "OK?"

"OK. Now settle down."

I was notoriously chaste. For years, Tony took great delight in announcing to people, sometimes upon first meeting them, "I was the first man ever to sleep with Sharon Smith."

When Tony was arrested during my junior year, it absolutely undid me. I had not lived a life of unrelenting sunshine and rainbows, but this was, absolutely and undeniably, the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

One of the things we had in common back then was sobriety, a relatively uncommon trait in our group. When Tony arrived back at the school after being processed and released at the juvenile facility, I saw him climb out of the car and I went to meet him. I had never seen that look on his face, never seen him walk with that heaviness. He looked at me and said quietly, "They strip searched me for drugs, Sharon." My heart broke.

We were in the middle of rehearsing for our spring play, the largest show of the year. When Tony was suspended and then expelled and forced to complete the year at another school, I was a mess. Barred from even attending the show, Tony arranged for a bouquet of blue balloons to be delivered to the cast onstage during curtain call closing night. I wrote a sappy poem about it that was published in our school literary magazine, and saved one of the blue ribbons and wove it into my hair the next year when I went to the prom.

Tony was the only person I danced with at my prom. He was there with his fiancee, Jeanette. I was there hoping to see my best friend be crowned Prom Queen. Someone else won, and Tony barked to our table, "Nobody clap!" I clapped anyway – it was only courteous. I stepped on his feet twice during the dance; I am dance impaired.

Tony quite literally handed me back my life once. I'd been acting since I was 12, loved tech almost as much, and intended to continue doing both forever. But, I spent three of my four high school years with a teacher assigned to the theater classes simply because she had low seniority and no one else wanted the job; she'd never even seen a play before being assigned to us. I left high school having learned anything new, for three quarters of my time there, from the other students or on my own. I felt woefully inadequate to pursue anything theater related, even for fun. Oh, well, I thought, those are the breaks. Things happen. I'll get over it. Then Tony phoned one day shortly after my graduation.

The local university was having open auditions for "Chicago." Their auditions were always open to the public, so it didn't matter that neither of us were students - Tony wanted me to go try for a tech job with him. I dragged my feet.

"You don't sound excited about this!" he barked at me.

"I don't think I'm qualified to do anything."

"I'm not qualified either! Let's just go." Tony'd owned his own stage lighting company since he was 13; if he wasn't qualified, who was? I went with him. I spent the next ten years exclusively with the university theater department, then found I was also at home in other theater companies. As I write this, I'm preparing for the final dress rehearsal of a show, one I'm in with my husband and two of my kids. There are no words adequate to thank someone for handing you your identity back.

Most of the time, girls Tony was dating, and girls who wanted to date him, didn't worry about me at all, since I was obviously not a romantic rival. Sometimes, though, someone resented me. After Tony and Jeanette broke up, a girl working on a show with Tony and me took the opportunity to ask him out. He was taking the breakup pretty hard, and told her, "I just can hardly stand to even look at anyone female right now. I don't even want to be in the same room with any females." She was disappointed; in a few minutes, she became angry – at me.

Tony asked me, in the course of conversation, if I wanted to go to a movie the next night. Incensed, the girl said, "I thought you couldn't even look at anything female right now!" Tony looked at me, back at the girl, and expressed his puzzlement.

"That's not a female! That's Sharon."

The poor girl was fairly lukewarm to me after that, even years later.

When I got married, Tony stood beside my husband. When my first child was born, he brought a tiny T-shirt to the hospital that was a replica of our high school drama guild shirts. My children have called him "Uncle Tony" all of their lives. When he got married on New Year's Eve, I bought a black and gold formal to wear. When he broke his back, I drove him on errands and prayed for his recovery.

For years, he had the Midas touch. Nothing he tried failed, or turned out badly, or lost money. Since he never does anything in a small way, when it all went to hell it was really, truly hell.

Tony probably doesn't remember this, but when things got really ugly, with the cocaine, the booze and the craziness, I told him that he could only screw up badly in front of my kids once, and then he wouldn't see them again until they were 25. I meant it, too. He may not remember it, but somewhere he internalized it. He may have been absent from our lives for months at a time, but he never made me question whether he could be around my kids. He came close only once. The few horror stories they've heard, they've heard now that he's sober. They never had to watch him spiral out of control. That's a gift, too, to me and to them.

"Can you imagine me on cocaine?" he asked at one of our theater reunions. (Yes, we organize our own high school reunions, just for those of us from the theater department.) We all said the same things. "I don't have to – I saw it!" "It was ugly." "You're so lucky you never really saw it, Tony." "God help me, it was awful."

When Tony decided to get sober, he was a mess. His hands shook. His memory was dreadful. More than once, we'd be somewhere in public and someone would approach, saying, "Hey, man, it's been a long time. How are you?" Tony would have an entire conversation, then ask me after they'd gone, "Who was that, and how do I know them?"

His life sounds more like melodramatic fiction than a real life. It's not, I promise you. You will find yourself disbelieving what he has to say, but it all happened.

Tony is exasperating, clueless, infuriating, loving, amazing, talented beyond belief and his own worst enemy. I love him with all my heart.

Love him or hate him, you'll never forget him.

******************

I'm not sure what it will be like to be here on Earth without him.

I wish him peace in the next life.

I am so glad that those of us who knew him have each other to lean on right now.

I miss you, my brother. I always will.

"A Clean, Well Lighted Place"

I wrote this several years ago. I tend to think of the ditch I mention as mine, but I've recently rediscovered the fact that it looms large in other people's memories and affections, too. Maybe sharing the memories benefits us all.

I have friends who live in the mentioned subdivisions; houses that we used to call McMansions are now considered just standard suburban homes in standard neighborhoods. Just so any of you living there know, I don't hold it against you, really I don't! Now, if you served on the city council that covered the ditch, well - I do hold that against you. Sorry.

********************************************
Every day for most of my life, I've looked at the same hillside to the east. Our valley is ringed by the Sierra Nevada range and its foothills. I've usually lived in the northeast part of the valley, close to the foothills on two sides. They're rarely green; usually they're brown or yellow with reddish volcanic rock showing through the sage and dried grass. They were great places to climb, play hide and seek or catch lizards when I was a kid.

Over the years, the city has slowly crawled up the flanks of the hills. First, there were only ranches at the base. Then, a few houses sprung up low on the hill – trophy homes taking advantage of the view. When I was 12 or so, a hospital was built there – again, fairly low on the hill. More recently, the ranches at the base have given way to upscale subdivisions. I mourned the loss of the last ranch, knowing full well that the owners made a bundle on the sale and were undoubtedly less grieved than I was.

With the upscale subdivisions came the sprawling golf course. Now there's man made irregular Kelly green patches snaking almost all the way to the top of the hills. They're visible from clear across the valley, a change I'm not used to. The bright green just looks odd next to all the yellow, brown and red.

With the golf course came the palatial clubhouse, a veritable castle halfway up the slope. In an odd way it reminds me of a medieval fortress. It's lovely, I guess, and the view is stunning, but I resent it. I liked the unimproved hill.

The hills to the north have sprouted crowns of houses, large homes on tiny lots looking out over the valley. Soon I'm sure the subdivisions will climb up to meet them, but right now they perch there, seemingly disconnected. I watch the tops of the nearby hills and worry. One is Canoe Mountain. I don't know if that's the actual name or not, but it's always been called that. It's shaped like a canoe; I worry that the distinctive shape will soon be obliterated by a new neighborhood.

The trophy homes are multiplying now. Yesteryear's impressive designs looked dwarfed and dated by their new neighbors.

Yet, with all this going on, I was unprepared for the way the hills looked yesterday. They look ripped and bleeding, huge swaths cut into the incline and leaving exposed areas that leak pink and yellow. I have never so clearly understood what John Denver meant when he sang about "scars upon the land." It looks like strip mining, but it's not. They're putting in more houses.

I tried not to think about it. I tried not to worry about the fact that for the first time, the actual contours of the hillside are being altered on a large scale. I have enough to worry about. We need a new roof, I need to see the dentist, my daughter is leaving for college, my garden needs tending, my children need tending... Construction is inevitable, change is inevitable, and I can't use a lot of mental energy decrying it.

I thought I'd handled the stress very well. I apparently had not. As often happens, the stress leaked into my sleep.

I dreamed I was property shopping, uncharacteristically with a fairly large group. We were looking at places that had survived as little farms or ranches. The plan was not to convert them to new neighborhoods, but leave them untouched. In my altered reality, my friend Vickie was planning on using one slightly small, ramshackle property with a tall, skinny house as an art gallery. I was beside myself with glee.

It was not as exciting, though, as discovering an open stream. We found that several of the places had this stream running through or by them. We stood on the spot where it flowed under the street, watching the fish. Because it was a dream reality, the fish were a very unlikely mix of saltwater fish, koi and some utterly fictional varieties. I decided that people must have let their fish out of their tanks into the wild. I resolved to buy the neighboring real estate immediately. It was disorienting to wake up and discover that none of it existed.

I don't need Sigmund Freud to tell me what that was all about. I try not to bear grudges, I really do, and I usually do pretty well. I know I bear the city a grudge, though, from 25 years ago.

Easily my favorite feature of the yard I grew up in was the irrigation ditch going through the pasture. My parents wouldn't allow me out there by myself until I was eight years old, fearing that I would drown. A reasonable fear, surely, but I don't think it would have been an issue with me. I'm not a big swimmer, and I've never accidentally fallen into any water. I'm not generally a physical risk taker. Besides, it was usually only a foot or two deep. If I fell, I could just stand up. Anyway, from the age of eight on, I spent hours and hours out there. I rarely missed a day in warm weather. I caught minnows, I inner tubed, I sailed my toy boat. I dug bones out of the bank, convinced I'd discovered a dinosaur even when my mother assured me that it was a cow. I studied the moss, the snails and anything else I found. I watched and photographed the ducks, hoping we'd get a nesting pair and a brood of fuzzy ducklings. I sat on the low footbridge, kicking the sparkling water into the air. I learned that mud, immediately applied, would mitigate the effect of stinging nettles.

In the winter, the ditch often froze enough to permit ice skating. My parents would have to break a hole for the horses to drink through, and when the ice was two or more inches thick they deemed it safe to skate on. We never broke through; even if we had, the deepest spot on our property was only about 3 ½ feet deep. We would have been wet, but not in danger.

Since I was the youngest, my skates were usually hand me downs. When I was about twelve, though, my parents bought me a beautiful pair of pale blue leather ice skates. I tied gold pom poms to the toes, and felt glamorous wearing them. Wobbly figure eights were as fancy as my skating got, but I loved gliding back and forth between our fence and the bridge.

After it left our pasture, the ditch went only a short distance before it went under the road, dropping a number of feet on the other side. The water pouring down from the pipe laid under the street dropped about four to six feet before it hit the ditch again, and had dug a deep hole underneath, the deepest spot I knew of anywhere in the ditch. Neighborhood kids loved this swimming hole. It was the only spot we knew of that was over-your-head deep. Just about everyone except me liked going through the pipe, to shoot out the other side and plummet through the air. I wouldn't even float under the bridge in our own pasture; I surely wasn't going to go under the street in a dark and narrow pipe. Everyone swore that you could breathe just fine, and that it wasn't scary at all, but I still refused to try it. I hopped out well ahead of the street, afraid that if I waited too long I'd be sucked in.

I'd followed the ditch for about a mile upstream, to where it emerged from a large pipe under the street. From there, you had to go quite a ways upstream before you encountered open water again, so I knew that the city occasionally buried the irrigation channels. Still, from our house to the river, a considerable distance, the ditch flowed unimpeded. I was sure it always would.

Then I came home from school one day and found bulldozers in my back yard. I was fourteen years old. The city had decided to bury the ditch. My parents knew, but had chosen not to tell me, knowing how upset I'd be. The heavy machinery was preparing the channel for the culvert they'd be laying.

I thought about all the memories I'd made, and the fact that there would never be any more. I realized that I didn't even have decent photos. My camera was malfunctioning; the shutter was sticking, and pushing hard enough to take a photo jostled the camera so that the resulting image was blurry. Despite this, and my mother's insistence that I would be in the way and get in trouble, I grabbed the camera and ran for the pasture.

My spot for quiet contemplation was marred by roaring, beeping machinery. They were working their way through from our neighbor's yard and had just started on ours. I took photos of the rest of the ditch, capturing blurry images of my sacred place. The water looked like chocolate milk, not like the crystal clear water I was used to. It tore at my insides to see things this way, but I couldn't imagine not even saying goodbye.

As well as the smaller footbridge, we had one large bridge made of heavy timbers – old railroad ties and the like. It was tough enough to drive across, and it was where I'd stood to sail my wooden boat, unrolling the ball of yarn attached to its stern. A tractor picked the bridge up and threw it aside, splintering it.

I never should have gone back out the next day, but I had to have one more moment with just me, no workmen and no machines. It was awful. They'd stopped the flow of water in preparation for laying the culvert. Instead of twisting and turning, everything in my ditch was now straight. No more banks, no more plants; it was squared off and lined with gravel. It was sterile and straight sided. There would be no more ducks, no more fish, no more inner tube rides. My heart broke.

I didn't go back out until after they'd laid and buried the pipe. I rarely went back out after that. It just hurt too much. This old childhood hurt can still bring me to tears. I lost a friend or family member, lost them rather cruelly.

During my junior year of high school, our debate teacher had us read "A Clean, Well Lighted Place." I don't remember anything about it other than the title. Our assignment afterward was to write about our own clean, well lighted place. "Everyone needs a place for reflection, for decision making, for a refuge from the world, " he told us. He asked us to write about our own. Then, we'd be asked to read our essays out loud to the class.

Far and away, the most popular answer was, "my bedroom." For most teenagers, their room and their car are the only places they truly feel are theirs. I struggled to write something mainstream, but I just couldn't do it.

The debate teacher and I did not get along. Later in the year I left his class and the debate team; we simply could not work together. I was sure he would find something wrong with my essay. I wrote about the ditch, sure that his first complaint would be that an irrigation ditch through a dusty horse pasture could not qualify as clean.

My essay began, "I no longer have a clean, well lighted place. I lost mine three years ago." I was a teenager, with a life far different from my life at age eight or ten. Still, I felt the loss of my meditative spot acutely. There were times I needed it, and more such times were coming.

I described my love for this simple, watery spot. I told about going there when I was in pain, as I did at age 12 when I found out my best friend was moving away. I described celebrating, exploring, decision making, regaining my equilibrium when it was shaky, anchored by this beloved place.

While I was reading, my overriding emotion was anger. I was still angry at the city. I was angry at a disliked teacher for making me bare my soul in front of my peers. I was angry at the thought of being ridiculed; I was sure someone would. No one was going to be able to relate to a deep, emotional connection to a ditch, I was sure.

I even described that horrible last glimpse before they laid the pipe without letting too much of the sadness through. I described feeling adrift without the place I had used to recharge my batteries. Then, I gritted my teeth and braced for the comment period.

Anger was manageable, controllable. I was prepared to continue feeling angry. I knew I could get through the nasty comments and the low grade I expected.

Instead, I was undone by understanding. I had been so together, so articulate. Then my friend Wendy spoke.

"I was really moved by your description of how it was cut straight and square," she said, and went on to say that she truly felt that was a desecration. She hadn't even finished the first sentence before I was in tears. I had not expected this. Someone understood. Someone sympathized. I began to bawl. I couldn't even speak; I mouthed, "Thank you."

I don't remember my grade. (I do recall that, uncharacteristically, the teacher had nothing critical to say.) I will always remember, vividly, how Wendy's kindness felt. Any loss is more bearable when it's understood.