losers weepers (4) the walnut tree

and there are no finders. you don't know what you got till it's gone. and sometimes you know, and you can't help it going away.

i remember when i was a little girl, only a few years old, that we used to have a garden a couple of streets away from our block. it was surrounded by a high fence of wild, thorny growth that my dad clipped, it was really thick, no one could get in and it was hard to see through. there was a sandpit where i used to play and make forms in the sand. and i'd make a little hole in the sand and pour in water and mix real fast with a stick. and i called the muddy dark water with bubbles on top 'pepsi' and that was about the only soft drink i got to see in those days. we had various veggies there and apart from that, strawberries and raspberries. i 'befriended' two girls from the area, twins. one's name was luminita. i can't remember the other's name. i proudly showed them the garden, including the strawberries. when they were ripe, my dad caught them stealing. and there was a larger pit, maybe a meter deep, with linoleum laid out on the bottom, and there were flowers on its bank, and a little stone garden and that was my mum's sunbathing place. and at one end, there grew a walnut tree. and it grew and grew. and either it grew sick at one point, or else my folks decided there was too much shadow, they wanted it gone. i cried when they killed it and i asked them not to. it wasn't chopped down, but my dad made several cuts across its trunk and it withered and died within a week. it seemed barbaric to me. it happened over fifteen years ago but i remembered it last week. i told him about it and he said it hadn't been a walnut, but a mulberry tree.