grows in Brooklyn
“We got a tree!” Michael said when he first saw it, sticking his head way out the window of our living room to view the scraggly, adolescent thing below, just ten feet tall, it’s branches too thin, baking in the summer sun. It didn’t look like the sort of tree that could necessarily survive the summer. When a new tree is planted in this city, it is beloved by the whole neighborhood. Trees are not taken for granted here, but are welcomed and tagged. They are the subject of sidewalk conversations with the neighbors and much inspection. And on one misty and drizzly day, when the world had that brown and blue hue particular to mid-summer, we took it upon ourselves to put up a dog fence around our tree and plant some flowers under it. That day, our neighborhood played a scene that could have been on Sesame Street. Next-door-Sue’s eyes got dewy when she saw us working in the rain, and she went upstairs and brought down some fertilizer from her apartment. Upstairs Tom sai