One day a little tiny girl came over to my house carrying a flower pot with a maple tree that had just started to grow. "This is for you, Mrs. Wetsewow."  I planted that little tree a nice distance north of another small maple that had sprouted on its own in a place that could use more shade. The new addition became known as the Josie Tree, and since the other was the right amount of years older it I thought of it as the Mason tree. A few years later I planted a third tree. Several times. The Tessa Tree(s) never got more than a foot high and tragedy would strike. I suspect one of my own children might have been the culprit for these repeated tree crimes. This child had often resisted my efforts to forest the lawn and interfere with his lawn mowing design. Oops. Gave that one away with the pronoun, didn't I, Sam!

Today I took a picture of what is left of these trees. Tessa, in the front, is sitting near the spot where her tree would have been. Josie's hands are on the stump of the smaller of the two trees the walnut took down when it fell, and Mason -- who did not know until I posed him for this picture that this tree was named for him -- is standing by what is left of what had just become a decent sized tree.

Of course you are wondering why I would do this for the neighbor kids and not for my own four children. The truth is that I did plant trees for them, and tonight as I worked in the yard I thought back to early days in the ministry when our homes were the parsonages of the churches we served. The first summer after moving in to our first parsonage I planted a tree with the help of a little 3 year old. We called it the Emily tree. Several years after we had moved away we heard out that it was potentially in the way of a shed and got moved. I just now looked on Google Earth and I think it is still there in its new spot. The shed, by the way, is gone. But I am jumping ahead in my tree story.

The parsonage lawn and the church there are just one continuous patch of green with no visible dividing line. That line did become visible in the summer because we would mow on Mondays starting wherever the church janitor drew the line on Saturdays. We talked about how nice it would be if there were a couple of trees along that line to create a pleasant boundary between our yard and the church yard. When Jessica and Sam were babies we carefully chose two spots in a nice straight line along this imaginary border. Two little maples saplings were found, planted, and encouraged to grow into mighty trees that would shade the church lawn to the east and the parsonage lawn to the west and perhaps even become a bit of a visible barricade between the two buildings.

Sometime later that summer we went on a two week vacation. Upon our return, a member of the building and grounds committee stopped in to say hello. Before he left he suddenly remembered some good news he had to tell us. "I found two little trees sprouting up on the lawn," he said cheerfully. "But I got rid of them for you. You don't want trees to grow there -- it would divide the lawn!"

Things didn't go much better in the parsonage we lived in when Megan was born. We moved to a house that was meticulously landscaped around all four sides, around the garage, and out into a large part of the back yard. Perfect for a family with a bunch of little kids, right? Wrong. Although the very expensive Japanese maple by the front door made a great fort. The only thing we ever planted there was a live Christmas tree we bought during a very short lived burst of environmentalist fervor. We said Never Again to something that heavy and awkward and needy. It thanked us for our back breaking efforts by dying within the year. Hmm, maybe that was when Rev.'s back troubles started.

Oh, yeah, I should mention him now and then. He's been reading. I'll try to work him in here a little more often.