Write a story about a place you loved that no longer exists. What was lost and what persists? How do loss and location mingle in your memory? What do we hold onto and what does that say about us?
It was on the right side of the road as I drove south and west. Just past a ditch and a 4-foot-tall wire fence, sitting on a small bump of a hill (all alone) was my favorite tree. I passed my tree three or four times a week and I always wanted to wake up early, when dew and low-lying fog covered the ground, and take a picture of that tree. But things happen and time passes and lightning strikes. And one day my favorite tree was gone. It had just ceased to exist. I think what happened was a storm, one of those Midwestern storms that come out of nowhere and turn the land black and ominous. I imagine through a sea of menacing clouds a steady roll of thunder filled the air and a flash of electric, blinding light carried on down to my tree. And through the smoke and fire, shards of tree lay scattered on the hill beside highway 50. Looking back on it now, it was only in a flash of time that I was able to admire the solitary tree. For a few seconds I would say ‘there’s my tree’ (and it’s funny to think but I felt a kind of peace of mind.) For an instant at 60 miles per hour I must have appeared as a white streak of metal on tires. It was about 55 minutes into my hour and a half drive when I reached this spot just past Knob Noster. Of course the tree is now gone, but the memory and the feeling that I have of it will never fade. Nostalgia can be both a dear friend and a mortal enemy. It can give you happiness and it can also send you into a deep depression with no end in sight. I think the reason I was sad when my tree was no longer there was because I imagined the tree was me at my happiest. Always there through the storms and the perfect days, never wavering, always bending with the westerly wind and always growing up toward the sky and down through the earth.
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