Whatever this is or ends up being, I’m writing on the patio beneath my parents’ bradford pear. I just finished reading a Borges story out here, and then I went back inside to my dad’s office and took a piece of printer paper out of the tray and a mechanical pencil my mom bought at Target out of the closet and them back out. I’m writing on a stone table that shakes a little bit with every movement of my hand. About two months ago we pressure-washed and refinished the whole patio and during this we picked up this stone table to move it and held it at an angle we shouldn’t, and the stone top snapped from its metal stand, which is why it’s wobbling now. We just slid the broken stone table right back on top of the stand. If it would have been lighter we probably would have thrown it away, but it’s stone and taking it to the front yard to be thrown away would have been a hassle, so we just left it back here. I’m glad we did, it has a nice pattern, and stone is cool and clean. I wish I could live in that Dwemer ruin city in western Skyrim, the name is escaping me right now the province is called the reach. Everything is stone because it’s a ruin, and they all sleep on stone beds there, which I think would make me a lot stronger than sleeping on a mattress or even carpet. Anyway, stone is cool and clean and gave me the strength to write this.
To my left is a row of overgrown bushes that protects me from the sightlines of my neighbors to my left. They’re always outside but their patio is smaller than ours. When I was younger, when we first moved to this house, I’d walk along the stone enclosure that circles these bushes imagining that I was in a castle the first few times but continuing because I liked the stones and I like balancing on them. You can’t walk along them anymore because the bushes are way too big. A few of the branches of the bush are brushing against me right now but it doesn’t hurt. When we were cleaning the patio trimmed them back a little bit because they honestly owned this entire corner of the patio. I asked my dad if I should cut them back to they used to be, thinking about my childhood walking around them and he said no which I agree with but it’s a little sad.
Now for the part you have all been waiting for. Above me is the titular Bradford Pear. It’s summer in full now so its leaves are full and solid green, but in the spring it flowers white and distinctively smelling flowers. Bradford Pears aren’t native to the Midwest, they’re from China, brought for their flowers and their durability in transit, to easily fill up the suburbs with pretty trees. But relative to Asia, in the suburbs, the Bradford Pears grow unchecked. They aren’t near any other trees to shape their growth. No one really talks about this, but trees grow so differently depending on their proximity to other trees. You can climb the deliberately planted trees in parks and parking lots so much easier than wild trees because wild trees are forced to grow directly up to compete with other wild trees. So the Bradford Pears use the strong soil from millenia of prairie death to grow up and out. They’re notorious for branches that fall off and damage houses because the trees grow so big that they cannot hold up the weight of their own branches. This has happened to my parents’ Bradford Pear. When I was maybe 12 I remember my dad pulling me outside, away from my computer games, to help him take care of a huge branch that had fallen from this Bradford Pear. I remember sawing away at it for at least 30 minutes, feeling sawdust for the first and maybe only time in my life, and getting a rash from it, my dad remembers us quickly abandoning doing it and paying someone else to handle the branch cleanup.
Like the bushes, the Bradford Pear has overgrown in the last decade. The branches of it are all over one side of the roof of the sunroom, and the whole canopy of the tree is close enough to the main house to almost make this area that I’m sitting in now a room, with the canopy of the tree as the ceiling. The bushes are one wall, the sunroom another, the main house another, and in front of me a window framed by the lowest hanging branches of the Bradford Pear on this side. There’s an outdoor light that lights up this area and is contained by the canopy, and that makes it even more of a room at night when I’m writing this. But unlike a room the air is fresh (cool and clean) and I don’t have to hear the muffled sound of the TV and I’m not burdened with my own desire to lay on the floor because the rocks of the patio are sharp.
So this is where I’m at. I like how the green of the trees and the bushes are lit up by the outdoor light against the night sky. I can see two stars, in the small gap between the Bradford Pear canopy window and the backyard tree skyline. Maybe I should get out my telescope and look at the rest of them. I think this is where the story ends. I have only about two inches of printer paper left and only about one inch of water left in my drinking vase (note: since the original time of writing, the drinking vase fell against the cement of the basement floor and is now in a recycling bin), but more importantly I don’t want to spend all of my cool and clean at once out here. This was enough for tonight.
