Two Feet of Mine
Outside Columbus, Ohio
The first thing I noticed when I stepped into my backyard that Sunday was the shadow. Not the balcony itself, not the posts, not the freshly cut branches scattered in the grass. The shadow.
A long rectangular patch of shade cutting across my lawn where the late afternoon sun had always fallen through the maple, landing on the same strip of grass in the same warm way it had since the day I moved in. The shadow was wrong. The proportions were wrong.
And when I looked up to find the source of it, the whole situation came into focus at once. I had been gone for a week. Guard training out in Missouri, routine stuff, nothing I needed to think about beyond packing the right gear and making sure Dave across the street knew to keep an eye on the place.
I had come back tired and ready for the particular quiet of my own house, and instead I was standing in my backyard looking at a structure hanging over my property line that had not existed when I left. To explain why that hit me the way it did, I need to tell you about the yard itself, because the yard was the whole reason I bought the house in the first place. I moved into the place in 2018.
Small two-story on a residential street outside Columbus, beige siding, older roof, a deck that announced itself with a squeak every time you stepped on it. Nothing that would make anyone stop their car and look twice. But the lot ran deep in a way that most properties in the neighborhood did not, and right near the center of it stood a maple tree that had probably been there since before most of the houses on the block were built.
In summer it threw a canopy of shade across the yard that made the temperature under it feel a full ten degrees cooler than the street. In October it turned orange in a way that actually made me go outside just to look at it, which is not something I had done with a tree before. When I first walked the property with the realtor, she started her pitch with the kitchen and the updated bathroom.
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