If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around...

I'm eating a persimmon plucked from the overhanging branches of my neighbor's tree. In the summer, the sighing branches dropped raw, green fruit on the lawn, but now it's groaning with the load of deliciously ripe, red-orange fruit whose color I can only describe as 'persimmon.' Is it wrong for me to take the fruit? The branches hang well over the fence (property line) on our side. My neighbor seems disinterested as I see vast bunches of fruit sitting untouched on his branches, overripening by the day. The people in my neighborhood are courteous, but seem to prefer to mind their own business - I don't think I've ever seen this neighbor or even heard them in their yard. When they fall in my yard, I don't feel bad tossing them in the garbage. And yet when I eat one, I feel guilty. I'm far too nerdy to ever be a thief.

When neighbors have nasty tree disputes, I've learned through work that there really aren't any laws governing trees, their maintenance, or overhang. Mostly branch trimming or leaf gathering is done as a courtesy - but when things get ugly, there have been times when a neighbor will just take a chainsaw right up the line of their property, hacking whatever branch comes in its way. Some cities make it a crime to chop down a mature tree without replacing it, and many people simply never admit to chopping it down in the first place. Tree trimmers in my mother's backyard cutting back her neighbor's enormous oak flattened her little crepe myrtle under the fallen branches. When she complained, they claimed it never happened or that the fallen tree never even existed. They had tossed her tree out with their garbage. On the flip side, you have institutions like Stanford University, who, when a mature tree stands in the way of development, will dig it out, trim back and ball up the roots, box it up in an enormous wood planter, and store it in a nursery to await a new home...clearly an enormous amount of labor and money gone into saving a single tree. I imagine a ranch of aging potted trees, waiting around in confusion as to how they ended up lined up in a pen. How'd you get in here?

For my girl Tamikas birthday I gave her a copy of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. It's not really an appropriate birthday gift in terms of being particularly uplifting, but it was always a favorite of mine as a kid - I like those sweet melancholy stories that mix loss and loyalty. In my old age I no longer think of it so literally as a tree but now see a parent in the tree- someone who sacrifices everything with only the hope that their little one will be happy, or better yet, simply spend some time with them. To this day when I see a wide tree trunk, obviously mature when it came down, I can't help but think of the Giving Tree, so I try to take a moment to sit on its stump and wonder what it once saw as the world grew up around it.


yup, that was our wedding. I still get all warm and fuzzy thinking about it.