Every once in a while, something important in your world shifts. Sometimes you don’t even realize how monumental that shift is until it has already happened. Last week, something like that happened to me, and this time the shift happened a little too close for home, and when I say that, I actually mean it quite literally.

To provide a little background, the place I currently call home is a small, one room apartment above someone else’s garage. It’s a pleasant, humble dwelling, the kind one looks back on in faint nostalgia, but more than spacious enough for a man and his dog.

However, my favorite thing about where I live now is the backyard separating me from the main house. It’s a lush Eden of beautiful plants and overgrowth, bright, vibrant grass, and several trees providing a lush canopy that covered most of the ground in luxurious shade. It was beautiful, it was peaceful, and my little home was just high enough off the ground that when I gazed out my windows my every view was framed by their branches.

In the summer I would admire the lush foliage, in the fall I would march through the crunchy leaves and bask in the bright and shifting colors, and in the winter I would gaze fondly how every trunk and branch would be coated in fine powder.

Those trees transformed my humble little dwelling into a sprawling treehouse, elevated above all worldly concerns, and allowing to gaze into the endless, beautiful horizon. It was more than my apartment, it was my haven.

How I Imagine My Home

Last week, six of the trees surrounding my home were cut down. The culprit? Fireblight.

Fireblight, as I have learned, is a destructive disease that attacks certain apple and pear trees. This includes the Bradford Pear trees that once framed my home, and now, after a long and tiring war with the blight, several of these soldiers have been removed from the battlefield.

The Feel of the Aftermath

The result? A not quite barren yard full of plants slowly dying from an overdose of sunlight, and an apartment that feels more exposed than a passed out camel in a desert full of vultures.

New trees will be planted, a new canopy will grow and flourish (some time in the next decade and a half), but in the mean time I feel the weight of the garage beneath me for the first time since I moved in.

It is a strange thing to feel like you’ve moved to a completely different place in the span of a day, and a difficult task to give up a home hidden in the leaves for something much more mundane, but such things are simply a part of life. Change is the only constant in a constantly revolving world, and if blight took my tree house from me, perhaps time or further change will one day grant me a new one.