LIFE LESSONS

What an Invasive Plant Helped Me See About the Future

Also, beware the future

From the author’s personal files.

I ran across this little popcorn tree a few days ago.

As strange as this may sound, I miss them.

(Yes, I do know that they are an invasive species, but go with me here.)

This one is growing in a field next to our apartment complex.

For it to be here, there must have been another such tree nearby. Reasonably close anyway. Maybe the wind blew a seed here. Maybe a bird thought that this field needed a new Chinese Tallow tree. Maybe the rain, I don’t know.

I miss them because, on our little half-acre lot in southwest Alabama, we had three such trees. All of them, to some degree, suffered the constant harassment of three rambunctious kids climbing, playing, and occasionally injuring a limb because these trees are soft.

And they bend easily.

Sometimes they broke.

So, when the inevitable storm winds blew in from Mississippi counties, whose names I learned to pronounce from the national weather service, our trees swayed, bent, and rode out the storms as best they could.

Here’s the best thing: At least one served as the portal to a magical place…