Going Home Again...

The landscape of my life has changed and I mean this in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. The most jarring change I witnessed when I went home was that my grandmother and mother decided to decimate the land around our home by cutting down the majority of the trees that surrounded our property. The need for money and the promise of an exciting renovation project probably motivated this decision. While I understand why my family would cut down the many trees on our land, the absence of the trees still affected me more than I would have ever thought.
Growing up in rural Mississippi, there were no near neighbors and play dates at the park. The trees in the front yard, the back yard, and behind the house provided a playground and a world from my imagination that entertained me for countless hours each day. I loved being outside in the trees.
There were also multiple moments when I hated those trees. Every fall my sister, Tocie, and my first cousin, Michael, and I would be forced to rake pine straw, stuff bags full of pine straw, and haul the pine straw away from our property. And while I hated the straw, I loved the pine-cones. We would have pine-cone wars and make pine cone breasts and bake pine cone meals in our imaginary forest world on any given day of the year. These times are gone and it makes me sad that my nieces and nephew will not be able to enjoy these experiences as I did.In a deeper sense, the trees represented something I thought would always be a part of my life. If I could never count on anything being the same about my home, I thought I could count on the trees. The trees around my home represented something constant and something secure. There was safety in the trees that surrounded and protected my home and now those trees are gone. I realize now, more than ever, that my childhood home is not my home any longer.