Fall's last hold out

Dear Bro,

When Michelle, mum, and I came out to visit you at Camp Atterbury this summer, we picked you up in mum's silver Jetta and went cruising the boulevards of the southern suburbs of Indianapolis. While heading back toward your base after a full day of 1/2 Priced Books browsing, Pirates of the Caribbean movie watching, mall walking, and TGI Friday's munching, you were heard to vocalize the following sentence:

"Now, while I am over there, remember that no matter how insignificant or boring the details are, they will be of interest to me while I am over there in Iraq."

As your humble liege, your wish is still my command.

Thus today we talk about the tree in my front yard. Let's start with a picture of it in the spring.

Pretty, isn't it. Now for the life of me I have do not have a clue what type of tree this is. It has been a front yard staple since we moved in back in 1998. Every April, usually the second week, it will bloom the beautiful white you see in the picture, a visual delight, but one we missed this year as we were in England while it was busy showing off. We knew we had missed it when arriving home on a windy day and saw the last remaining white flowers littering our yard as the rest had been redeposited all along our street. There was one aspect we were glad we did miss as part of this spring ritual. And that was the smell of these flowers. A good example would be if you have been on a mission and have not had a change of clothes for two days. When you arrive back to your base you sit down, take off your footwear, and then proceed to take a deep inhale of the scent of your socks. This is probably the closest recognizable scent to match the one given off annually by the front yard tree.

It also holds secret inhabitants. Most trees are homes for such critters as squirrels, birds, or bagworms. This tree showed it's secret inhabitants in 2004 when in the last week of May hundreds (if not thousands) of Cicada's burrowed out from beneath it's girth and began to sing to each other while hanging out in its limbs. Since this was Brood X that was last seen in Cincinnati in 1987, it was rather surprising to see them coming out at the base of this tree, as in 87 I suspect this particular specimen was little more than a sapling. They molted their skins at the base of the trunk, leaving layers of transparent Cicada outlines hanging off the bark like a disorganized version of Emperor Qin's terracota Army. They then sat in every branch of the tree, singing their noisy monotonous tune all day and then thankfully going quiet once the sun had set. Within 10 days their reign had ended, along with all the noise, and after slicing up the bottom of this tree's branches to leave their eggs. They quickly expired and fell to the ground, to be quickly brushed away by the wind or reclaimed by the other inhabitants of the front yard, mainly the now overstuffed bird population of northern Cincinnati.

Now we fast forward to today, and the reason for talking about this tree. As always, it has been a holdout. whereas most of the trees in the neighborhood have long since shaken loose all their multicolored leaves, the front yard tree held steadfast not conceding a single leaf, or even changing color from that summer light green that has endured for several months. That is until this weekend. We stepped out of the house on Sunday to find that overnight the leaves had both turned a crisp yellow while descending en-masse to a grassy grave, almost as if the tree was a cult that had instructed it's followers to "go to the next realm".

That's it... obviously nothing exciting happened today... not even a picture to post ....but then again this is the boring blog....