Small trees had attacked my parents' house at the foundation.
They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves.
Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks. They had grown into the unseen wall and it was difficult to pry them loose. My father wiped his palm across his forehead and damned their toughness. I was using a rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle; he wielded a long, slim iron fireplace poker that was probably doing more harm than good. As my father prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year's seedlings.
Whenever I succeeded in working loose a tiny tree, I
placed it like a trophy beside me on the narrow sidewalk that
surrounded the house. There were ash shoots, elm, maple, box
elder, even a good-sized catalpa, which my father placed in an
ice cream bucket and watered, thinking that he might find a
place to replant it. I thought it was a wonder the treelets had
persisted through a North Dakota winter. They'd had water
perhaps, but only feeble light and a few crumbs of earth. Yet
The each seed had managed to sink the hasp of a root deep and a probing tendril outward.
My father stood, stretching his sore back. That's enough, he
said, though he was usually a perfectionist.
I was unwilling to stop, however, and after he went into
the house to phone my mother, who had gone to her office to
pick up a file, I continued to pry at the hidden rootlings. He
did not come back out and I thought he must have lain down
for a nap, as he did now sometimes. You would think then
that I would have stopped, a thirteen-year-old boy with better
things to do, but on the contrary. As the afternoon pa**ed and
everything on the reservation grew quiet and hushed, it seemed increasingly important to me that each one of these invaders be removed down to the very tip of the root, where all the vital growth was concentrated. And it seemed important as well that I do a meticulous job, as opposed to so many of my shoddily completed chores. Even now, I wonder at the steepness of my focus. I wedged my iron fork close as I could along the length of the twiglike sprout. Each little tree required its own singular strategy. It was almost impossible not to break off the plant before its roots could be drawn intact from their stubborn hiding place.