"How to Choke an Oak Tree"
As a child, I used to imagine that my town had been folded in on itself, as if God had gotten bored and tried his hand at origami but failed miserably. Because of this, I never understood the comfort that an early autumn breeze could bring. Those wild winds that I’d only ever seen on television screens never did last very long in our small, suburban backyard. Mom used to call it our “postage stamp.” The surrounding buildings caused the dead air. Looming like monstrous sentinels, old dilapidated homes from the turn of the century swelled in the sun all around us, overwhelming everything save for an old tree that had somehow survived the last several decades of suffocating progress.
