When I was six years old I was living in LaGrange Park, Illinois.  It was a very mature town with streets lined with huge elm trees.  In the summer when the leaves were full on the  trees, the streets seemed like tunnels because the tree branches reached over the street to touch the trees on the other side.   It was a very beautiful neighborhood.  When the fall came, all the enormous piles of leaves were fun to play in. And then there was the smell of fall.  All the fathers, grandfathers, uncles and neighbors would rake the leaves into the street and burn them.  There was something pleasant about the smell of burning leaves in the fall.  Also, there was nothing like laying in bed and listening to the rain hit the leaves.

In the spring of 1958 the leaves didn’t come back because all the trees had died from the Dutch Elm disease. I was out in the front yard playing with a friend when the city truck came by and a man painted a big yellow “X” on every tree.  Within a month, all the trees were cut down revealing our neighborhood of dirty white stucco homes.   My neighborhood had turned ugly and I missed the trees.

Dutch Elm street was going to be a stark drawing of eight dead trees with yellow “X” painted on them but Debbie hated the drawing and she said it was the most boring drawing that I had ever done.  I liked it because it meant something to me, but I did not want Debbie to hate this drawing so I put Sean and Kelsey in the drawing and they were going to be planting the new trees.  Why did I pick eight trees?   It’s kind of morbid  because the eight trees are the four couples on Debbie’s side who are growing old.  A couple of the trees have squirrels nests in them and I’m keeping that  little story to myself.