Dorcas Freyman did not need to be told changes were coming, because he watched the trees.
Dorcas Freyman saw the best trees of his generation destroyed by madness, ripped up en masse to make way for particle board & cement structures
that smelled and looked worse than even the trees that Red Hat Grey Sweater and Tye Dye Ballerina chose to use as restrooms during the middle of the night, Lord
knows these structures, at the very least, have less roots!
So Dorcas Freyman knew. He thought as much when the ponderosa pines a few miles away started gettin’ felled one by one, replaced with a smattering of palm trees; they didn’t destroy the ecosystem, but they stood out. Then, the lot with the cottonwoods;
a whole row of ‘em chopped down, next to the now closed soul food place that sometimes left their dumpsters open. The “eatery” there now had all sorts of food mixed together in the dumpster, none of which seemed like very big portions, and all of which seemed like it was put there for out-of-town scavengers.
A light rail station down from that — Dorcas felt strange ways about the light rail; a lot of trees that stood next to it for a while started coming down fast,
replaced with newer trees that sometimes provided the right amount of shade for him, but only if he stood in just the right place—where the barber shop was until just a few months ago, more trees had come down, and the first of those places that smelled like yeast and went up on Welton Street, and that’s
when Dorcas Freyman knew, when he started thoroughly checking the neighborhoods near his favorite parks real closely and realized most of his favorite trees were gone, that he and Hermin were going to have to scramble and figure out what to do.
And it seemed like every night now he tried to tell this to Hermin Tapp, after he’d completed his daily scurry running the streets
bright eyed and bushy tailed, hoarding it seemed like whatever he could grab, questioning why there seemed to be less dirt and earth around and lots more steel and noise,
“Hermin,” he’d screech, heart racing, “they’ve taken down another one & this time I watched them do it!
Hermin Tapp, as always, followed behind and listened patiently, paranoid.
“& this one had been there forever!” Dorcas started up the base of their tree.
“It had been fruiting for 10, maybe 11 years!” He ascended quickly, in a spiral helix, with Hermin closely behind.
“They’re just going to put a sapling in its place, what good are saplings to you and me, Hermin?”
Hermin followed wordlessly, like he always did, and every frantic scrabbled loop up the tree shielded his vision for a quarter of a second from the orange cranes sprouting through what used to be the tree-filled horizon of Five Points, now flat and gray and lacking all its color.
©2020 by Saladin Thomas. All rights reserved.