ARCADIA, LEMON TREES AND YARDDOG

The older I get, the more I know about threes. Perhaps that is part of life. I don’t know their botanical names yet, but I know how to prune them, especially fruit trees. Several of my friends even call me an arborist. My neighborhood isn’t perfect but the trees are. They are a joy.

I learned most of what I know from my next door Greek neighbor. One day I met Alex in front of his house. “Why are you staring at your apricot tree?” I asked. In his thick accent he responded: “I am talking to my tree. It is telling me how to cut it. Listen.”

So Alex began to show me what his tree was “saying.” “I can show you what your apricot is saying, too.” He suddenly bounded into my yard and I began to learn a whole new language, one my trees “spoke.”

That is how my affair with trees began. Those long and quiet conversations led to beautiful trees, sharing fruit, giving new knowledge away to others and building a small community on Palm Drive in Arcadia.

Across the street from us was one special tree – a lemon tree. It produced the biggest lemons in the world. The average lemon from that tree was bigger than a grapefruit! I sent those lemons to my childhood home in York, PA.., shared them at church and used them in cooking; we all did. The former owner always said, “Take whatever you want.” Our entire neighborhood shared its abundance.

Recently someone new bought that property. They knocked down the house and tore up the lemon tree. A huge bulldozer took out in two minutes what we had seen grow for 40 years. Not only did they kill that lemon tree but they chopped down a city tree as well. That city elm made our street a tree-lined drive.

“They don’t like trees that block the front door.” The Arcadia city tree man told me.

“What do you mean: they don’t like tree in front of their house? Can’t you make them replace it?”

"Well, there is a fine, and a new tree will be planted.”

"... the same size as the old one?” I demanded.

“No, no, just a new tree.”

So, yesterday I began to wonder, how does a community fall apart? How can a public tree be killed just because someone doesn’t like it facing his front door? Does anyone care about a lemon tree that grew the biggest lemons in the world or how those trees will no longer make a small neighborhood a real community?

My mother who is 80 years old said: “I wish we could have said goodbye to it. We will never see another tree like that one.” I could not respond and perhaps there are no answers to any of those questions.

What I know is that I have live here and grown old with those trees. My father died in his house here. I have gone through our schools, have mowed and watered my lawn, tended my gardens, paid my taxes and made this town the kind of place others now desire and move into with such a seeming disregard for what we have cared for and loved.

Next year there will be a huge new house across the street. But I will remember those two old trees, see the shape of the fruit, smell those lemons and miss the shade from the elm. And in another 40 years? Well, neither my mother nor I will live long enough to see that a new little tree grow to make Palm Drive a tree-lined street again.

Originally written and published on August 29, 1999