I remember a quiet suburb surrounded by a nice forest and a relative natural silence, the kind that can’t be found there anymore. I still remember the kitchen that I would run around in, and remember playing on the driveway of that first home. Then, my family tree grew: sister was born, and we moved to a new house further from town.

Down the main road that brought us to the intersection with lights, cars, and people were a few shaded homes, rolling fields that would grow grass and flowers, or sometimes crops. I recall the forest along this road that stretched around the fields. One morning when my sister could toddle and I was getting rides to my early years of school, I noticed an abandoned barn that had the roof caved in.  I had seen it before, but now it was changing in appearance. I noticed a young sprouting tree, making the most of the rain-time and sunshine pouring in from the caved roof, planting its young roots in life just like me.

I didn’t think much of it, but as the seasons changed and the years passed away I had taken the habit of looking at that tree. I did not see it everyday, but I checked regularly on it, and its growth was confirmation of my own. In later times, when my sister could do much more than toddle along, and when my heart had been hardened like bark with age, I would not look at the Tree. However, those times when I did put my angsty teenage gaze to it I would always be awed by its new appearance. When I took long breaks from looking at it, I would always wonder why and then diligently notice its progress for the next little while.

As my sister followed me through school, I grew accustomed to the mute presence of the Tree.  It was not something I regularly thought about, but it stood in the back of my mind offering a place to nap in the shade, away from the sometimes-glaring rays of everyday life and problems. I wanted to go there. I wanted to go stand in the ruin, snoop around, and look at the Tree from something else than a car moving at 70km/h. I waited and waited for the proper age to do it, when I could walk, bike, or drive there. Then I could do all those things, but I never went. I waited on an undefined notion of the perfect moment and conditions.

When I learned to drive, my eyes and mind were on the road and on the clock. If I did see anything, it was a quick scene: road – leafy blur – road. I could have walked or biked, but did not.

My roots dug deeper. The rolling green fields and shady houses started to disappear. Part of the forest was annihilated in favor of a Wal-Mart, and a huge blue greenish water tower stood above all the land. Country homes were abandoned, cows and crops vanished from fields, and those pastures filled with suburban projects. The nearby garbage dump set to close soon was given a new lease; more time and more space before eventually being turned into a golf course.

It was a slow process. One morning my dad told me there a movie theater was going to take the place of the old garage on the corner. I believed him, and said so to my friends boastful of my local knowledge. After almost seven years of inactivity, the theater went up. Not in the empty gravel lot on that corner, but in a big plot of trees to join the growing forest of superstores and street lights.

I germinated, and began to flourish. I graduated, and begun to know myself. Teenage thoughts begun to fall like autumn leaves. The Tree was growing strong and its powerful young branches were overgrowing the grey roof. They extended mightily over the rusty metal, and the Tree would soon assume its role as protector in the relationship, sheltering the ruined barn as the structure had done for the Tree allowing it to grow. Sunny fields of grass still surrounded the area in those days.

One day as my sister went to high school; I was chilling in the back seat of my family’s car, and for the first time I noticed the picture had been erased. I looked as we passed, the overgrown grass, the plants surrounding the dying building were gone. The barn had been torn down, and the majestic Tree that had been guardian of time in my life had vanished without trace. A few seconds later the car sped on past the area, and my stunned look was forcefully torn from the area. Those few seconds were the goodbye.

At the time I did not even know why, but I could not shake this loss form my mind. I had not even really noticed the Tree since I had become a grown up with big important college responsibilities. Its familiar mute presence was replaced by an even darker and silent absence.

I passed now to look at the empty plot, and wait to see what would happen there. A couple dozen Moons came and went, and nothing happened. Then as the sprawling city, got closer they put up a sign saying: “A clinic will eventually be built here!” Next to it was one of those black and white city zoning law sign, containing paragraphs in small character droning on about municipal code. Or at least, that’s what I think they say.  I suspect nary a soul has bothered to take the time to actually read one of those, I know I didn’t.

The local folk heard the news and were quite pleased. Gone would be the dreadful days of driving fifteen minutes for medical attention, sunny five minute drives were ahead. Mirroring the fate of the dreamed movie theatre, the lot has so far remained empty. That sign has braved the seasons, winter, and summer, and then over again remaining immutable over the seasons, a stark reminder of its lifelessness.

There remain now only two un-colonized fields, caught in a multiple pronged attack from Suburbia so brilliant as to make even great generals pause in admiration. In youth I had heard grumblings that the fields would go. It was cause for community discussion and concern, but not enough for action it seems. I had repeated the words, echoed the concerns, but I did not know.

I did not know it would happen like this. Coming on so slowly, yet so quickly as if it had happened all at once. I have decided recently that I will uproot for continuation of my studies in Montréal. I do not recognize the landscape that surrounded my first experience with my complete family, and my burgeoning from a seedling to maturity. I feared what the area would look like after prolonged absence. Now I already fear what it will look like before I leave in the summer. I suspect the area will change more, though I say I can imagine it I know now I cannot prepare for it.

Now when I drive to town, I get disproportionately annoyed at the surge of new traffic. I don’t see the fields, grass, the Sun, or the Tree anymore. I see cars, I see red from lights and frustration, and it sometimes rubs off on me during my day.

The remaining fields and the distant forests that still lie behind them will be razed. The suburbs will move as far as the eye can see and where the cows once grazed there might be a street coyly named Moo Road, or Cow Avenue. Residents would giggle at the curious name while unaware of the punch line of the joke. The dump will maximize profit, as demand for shit removal, or “waste management” shoots up, and make as much money as possible before growing complaints cause it to open a new site further in the forest, establishing a new frontier outpost for the continuing second-wave colonization of the New World. The old dump will be converted into a 9 hole where the middle class men can parade their refinement, not knowing they’re playing on a pile of garbage. It might pain my mother to read this (I’ll visit, I promise), but I know that the absence of that tree will be one less reason to return to this area later in my life, and one less nostalgic moment that TV would demonstrate in a montage with some touching slow Maroon 5 in the background that would begin and end within thirty seconds before cutting to commercial.

Montréal was always a fascinating place to me. It was always great fun both young and now. One time when I was still but a sapling I learned that my mom had inherited a plot of land there, and now someone wanted to buy it. We went to Montréal to inspect the land and decide what to do with it. We came upon this freshly built small suburb in a quiet outreach of the city. A few of the house were still on sale, and there were a few empty lots, like ours, that had yet to be developed. When we came up to our plot I saw there was high grass, and a crooked tree right in the middle of the plot. It was crooked low and offered both shade and places to sit. There were some teenagers on the land at the tree when we got there. We looked at them and they left, it was apparent that this was a regular hang out for the kids in the block. I had been a bit frightened by them, and by what I perceived as tenseness from my mother when we saw them. We hung about, me and sister played in the tree while the adults looked around. When we went home I learned my parents had decided to sell; a house was going to be built there. I was disappointed. I thought we were going to move there, or build a house to rent and/or use. But they rightly decided that we did not need two houses. Recently, I was frustrated in thinking about this. My current move to Montréal could even have had an inherited house in it for me. I’m glad I didn’t get that. I’ll work to pay my rent in an apartment in town. Anyways, if I had that plot of land, I thought, I could live there eventually; I could build a house there. But now I don’t think I would have done anything. I would have left that tree there as a silent witness to fickle memories of what had once existed there instead of just another coyly named street.