"Ferment" by Roxy Paine

There is a tree in the front yard of my parent's house. This tree has been a staple in my life since we moved to this house when I was 4. Family pictures have been taken in this tree, college papers written about this tree, and my initials carved into this tree.

Over the years it has gotten larger and larger. It marks the neighborhood as being older, the giant trees showing the ages of the houses. The tree has been trimmed to keep it from growing over the house, vital branches for the make believe games we played in the tree have long since been cut down. Yet it grows.

There was a storm last year. I was away at school when it hit, but the tree out front was hit by lightning. There didn't appear to be much damage at first. Now, as summer has brought with it large leaves, the damage from the lightning is striking. Half of the tree stands much as before, strong and green and very much alive. Yet, placed in front of the living branches, the other half of the tree stands completely bare. It's branches reaching for the sky, yet looking like veins or nerve endings.

Every time I look at it I'm reminded of an art installation on the front of our local art museum. A sculpture outside on the lawn of a stainless steel tree. It brought to mind the structure of nerve endings. It was cool, and unsettling. That's how I feel about the tree. It is cool, and it is unsettling. Something about nature reflecting the very makeup on things that speaks to something else. Something about the blatantly obvious way one can see different things being represented instead of nature's more subtle approach. Something about the juxtaposition of death and life, of leaves and sticks, of future and past, of surface and beneath.

I don't know what we will do with the tree. To cut off that much of it would look ridiculous. To leave it as it was would be worse, but to cut it completely down would be heartbreaking.