The View From My Window

            Looking straight down, it’s a three foot drop to the roof of the screened-in porch. Across the expanse of grey shingles that make up the roof, the massive maple tree waves its branches, beckoning me to come and play. Bright green leaves whip back and forth, inverting themselves suddenly in a gust of wind. The maple is at least 12 years old – I can only just remember when we planted it, and I can’t remember what it looked like before it got this tall at all anymore. My room is on the second floor of the house, and the top of the maple has long since passed my window.

            If I look off to the left, past the edge of the roof, I can see the concrete slab of our driveway extending out from the garage. The roof of our garage is just barely visible, stretching away from my window, as my room sits in the corner of the house. My little brother loves to throw his tennis ball against my wall in the morning during the summer. I haven’t figured out yet whether he’s doing it on purpose to wake me up, or he just doesn’t realize that that’s my wall.

            Dad’s basketball hoop sits at the edge of the concrete slab, presiding over our “half-court” driveway. It barely gets used any more – we’re all too busy. The backboard is faded away to a non-descript white color and the pole is rusting away.

            Right at the edge of the porch’s roof and the concrete slab stands the world’s most pathetic pine tree. It’s been there forever – it came with the house, and I’m not sure whether it’s healthy at this point. It keeps shedding its needles in the fall, getting all over the driveway and any car that happens to be parked there, so we haven’t done anything to it yet.

            Looking out past the maple and the pine tree sits our massive tallow tree. It’s not as tall as the maple, but what it lacks in height it makes up for in width. Dad hates it – he says it’s a weed tree, and he’s been trying to convince my sister that we should cut it down for years (unfortunately for him, around the time he started to get serious about cutting it down, she turned into an environmentalist). It’s a really messy tree – constantly dropping twigs, leaves and seed pods all over the yard.

            It's home, and I love it.