When Baby Trees Only Look Innocent

When Baby Trees Only Look Innocent

When I was 9 years old, our school had an assembly about environmentalism and we were each given a little tree to plant in our front yards. Because I lacked a green thumb and was prone to laziness in most physical activities, when I returned home, I promptly abandoned my little tree in the garbage without a thought.

Little did I know, six months later, that little tree's ghost would rise out of the garbage and stab me in the back. The revenge came in the form of a required writing contest at school. The topic? To write what became of our little gardening experiment.

Being the little brown-noser that I was, I could not possibly write the truth, so I foraged through my imagination for a fib. My thought process was that I wanted to lie as little as possible, so the tree in my story would, in fact, have to die.

When one needs to place blame in these sorts of situations, one's father is always a very handy plot device. So, the tree became a victim of my dad's inability to control his lawnmower. In my story, I recounted my tears of grief.

In fact, I became so absorbed in the writing of the essay and my pity over the fictional me that I over-shot the mark of how compelling the essay needed to be and I won the writing contest.

My win made the pages of my story beat like O'Henry's "Tell-Tale Heart."

But my guilt was assuaged when I learned of the "reward,"which was to read the essay over the loudspeaker at school. As a painfully shy child, this felt like a fate worse than that of the tree.

Indeed, when I read the essay over the loud-speaker, the shrieks of my shy nature and the screams of my conscience exacerbated my childhood tendency to mumble and speak quickly: my classmates were left without a clue about what became of my tree, in either the fictional or non-fictional sphere.